


Pen Pals Have Feelings, Too

by IndraraSkye



Series: Caledonia [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Aftercare, Cuddles, Daddy Kink, Don't Try This At Home, Explicit Sexual Content, Future Fic, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Peter's version of wooing someone is weird, Praise Kink, Relationship Talk, Sensual BDSM, Steter Week, Steter Week 2019, Stiles is smart but clueless, Sugar Daddy Peter Hale, daddy dom, enter at your own risk, entire walls of text, fellating of dildoes on video, insert appropriate tag here, monster dildoes, pen pals to lovers?, stalking may occur, this work is not fit for MidnightThoughts, un-negotiated kink play, using their words, video call-in BDSM, yet more dildo action
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-07-29 20:36:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20088400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IndraraSkye/pseuds/IndraraSkye
Summary: This is a prequel to my "Caledonia" stories. Stiles lands himself a mysterious pen pal while he's attending GWU in Washington, DC. Being Stiles, he falls for his nameless stalker and enters into a quasi-relationship with them. You can probably already see where this is headed.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This prequel was supposed to just be a fun little story for day 4 of Steter Week (prompts courting and/or kicked out of the pack), since the prequel idea fit so well with the prompts. It has turned into a frightening, multi-part epic that went from cute explanation of how Peter wooed Stiles to an absolutely filthy version of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. I've been writing it for two days now, and I had to stop here just to have something to post. I shall be working on the next part starting ten minutes from now. Our dear older wolf may be a bit of a stalker in this one, but really, that's kind of par for the course with him. Un-beta'd, blah blah blah, all mistakes my own, blah blah blah, filthiest thing I've ever written, blah blah blah.

He loved GWU. He really loved it. He loved DC, as it turned out. It had cherry blossoms in the spring, winters with snow storms and functional fireplaces, and more supernatural variety than he’d ever seen before. It also had some really slammin’ gay bars, but with the nation’s highest level politicians all gathered here a good portion of the year, how could it not? Just last week, a junior senator blew him in the alley behind the home of one of his favorite drag shows ever. DC was absolutely fabulous. Especially after his breakup with Lyds last winter. It had really sucked that they didn’t work out, but after their initial rush of “I love you; I remember you” the last semester of high school, it just sort of settled into what it had been before the Hunt—slow and gentle and wonderfully platonic, and agonizingly long distance. It wasn’t what he wanted, and he’d lost all sense of self-preservation enough to actually tell his best friend that he didn’t want to date her anymore. It went over about as well as he’d expected it to, which is to say not well at all. Lydia had been furious—how dare someone think THEY could dump HER—and he’d tried to explain that this wasn’t so much a dumping as a suggestion to return to their former glory. She’d hissed and spit over the phone and accused him of meeting someone else down there and that person was probably a guy and WHY were all the men in her life gay or Scott McCall, which…He wasn’t gay. She was just more like his sister than his lover. That didn’t make him gay.

All her hissing and spitting about him liking dick more than her did make him kind of wonder for a minute, though. Derek Hale had left him with severe shame boners through most of high school, but he’d always just attributed that more to being a teenager with a kink side than Derek. Did he like dick? He decided to experiment with the rest of his freshman year.

It turned out he liked dick. He liked dick a lot. He liked giving dick. He liked receiving dick. He liked sucking dick. Hell, it turned out he even had a thing for rimming people. Definitely bisexual, him. Surprisingly okay with it, too. He didn’t bring it up at his next visit to Beacon Hills, though. He didn’t want to give BOTH his ex-girlfriends any more ammunition to sling at him, and Scott talked a good game about being open, but outside of Danny, whom nobody had seen since junior year of high school, and Jackson, who made it a point to have as little to do with Scott’s pack as possible, Scott’s friend circle was surprisingly hetero normative. It wasn’t particularly Scott’s fault, it was just the way of things around Beacon Hills. Stiles knew his dad would support him, but there had already been that awkward discussion in the tenth grade about how Stiles couldn’t possibly be gay because of the way he dressed. Stiles tried to spend a bit more time talking to Mason and Corey on his next few visits, but everything there just felt weird and forced, and he got the feeling that they liked their place on the very edge of the pack, so he let them be and just tried to casually hang with them more when nobody was looking. By the time he headed back to GWU to start his sophomore year, he and Mason had a pretty great streak going on Snap. He felt pretty good about that. Mason had even taken him back-to-school shopping for better clothes. Turns out the kid had a thing for fashion. His new clothes felt just as good as his old clothes, and suddenly his ass was A-MAZING. His first week back in DC, he snapped Mason a pic of the very large hand grabbing his ass through the jeans that were so tight they looked like latex body paint at one of the back to school shindigs. He got back a thumbs up and a cheesy grin. 

He managed to score himself a better apartment than the one from his freshman year, but with more roommates than before. It was also a slightly longer bike ride to campus, which was going to suck come winter, but it was worth it for more space to move around in. His apartment last year had been roughly the size of a matchbox, and his roommate had a thing for bean burritos and clipping his toe nails during reruns of _Friends_. He did not miss Deacon at all. He barely knew the three other guys he was sharing the two-bedroom this year with, and he kind of hoped they could keep it that way. One of them was a vampire. He recognized the signs and characteristics, though the guy did a decent job of passing. He jumped at the chance to share a bedroom with that guy—they’d have opposite schedules, and he’d be able to bring more people home if this semester went anything like last semester did. 

He woke up early for his third day of classes and took the time to actually make himself presentable for his first class at 10 am. (The fact that he lived off campus did not stop him from enjoying the old college-student stereotype of pajamas and bedhead for classes before noon.) He grabbed his travel mug, which was really more like a portable barrel keg if he was honest with himself, and his bike. When he turned to lock his front door, an envelope was taped to his front door. His name was pasted in letters from magazines to the front of that envelope. Interesting. 

He locked the door and stuffed the envelope in the front pocked of his backpack, then took off toward campus. If he hurried, he could actually get the reading done for his 1 pm class.

It wasn’t until he was grasping around blindly for a pen at the start of his 5 pm class—and what kind of sadist sets a class on the criminal forensics of blood spatter patterns for dinner time?!—when the envelope from that morning fluttered out of his bag. He’d completely forgotten it was there in all the excitement of GI tracts and the merits of Jane Austin being feminist for her time and statistical analysis and the taco truck being on campus that afternoon. Wednesdays were one of his busy week days, okay? It wasn’t his fault that he’d forgotten an envelope taped to his front door that looked like it could be a ransom demand.

He opened the envelope carefully, ripping down one side of it instead of opening it on the flap—there could be DNA on the flap should he need to have it tested. He was the son of a sheriff. He was curious and scatter brained, but he wasn’t stupid. He also opened the end further from him and kept that end of the envelope angled more toward the ceiling. He held his breath as he ripped. 

He couldn’t see any powder flying up, so if it held some sort of airborne toxin, it wasn’t released in a powder form. He went ahead and exhaled. If it wasn’t a powder, it was already scattered throughout the room. It’d get him whether he breathed normally or not. He set the envelope on the desk and waited a couple minutes, taking the moment to people watch. College kids were actually surprisingly boring in their natural environment. He was a little disappointed. 

When nobody in the room turned purple or dropped dead after a few minutes of his new envelope sitting inert, he picked the envelope back up and peered inside. A single tri-folded 8x10 sheet of paper sat inside, a plastic card inside of that. 

Even more interesting.

He went ahead and pulled out the piece of paper, the card staying where it was and coming out, too. When he unfolded it, he found a McDonald’s gift card taped to the top of the paper, a message pasted on to roughly a quarter of the paper using tiny little letters cut out of probably magazine articles, not headlines, and a photo copy of runes forming sentences on the bottom half of the page, though he couldn’t really tell if they were Elder or Younger Futhark. He should have opened this envelope much earlier in the day. This was a bit of a delight.

He read the pasted fine print first:

_ This gift card has $50 on it. It is to be used in the morning for breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and I’m tired of you skipping it every day and then pouring that battery acid you call coffee down your throat. You’re going to end up with an ulcer if you don’t start eating first thing. I will know if you skip breakfast, and you have no excuse from here on. You could feed a third-world country with $50 at McDonald’s._

_The runes you see below should prove very helpful to you. Translate them, then act on that translation. You are a brilliant young man. I expect you to want to better yourself in every way, and you’re certainly dressing better and pursuing your academic education to the fullest. It’s time to hone other things._

_Don’t let me down, Stiles_.

It was fairly stalker-y, fine, but this guy basically just gave him fifty bucks and said he was brilliant. This wasn’t the first creepy stalker he’s had to deal with, but it certainly was the most generous. He had no idea what those runes said, but his stalker knew he didn’t eat breakfast, liked his coffee strong and black, had gotten himself a new wardrobe, and was living the good life academically. The guy probably knew what would turn his crank when it came to new things, too. He’d get to work on the runes when he got home that night. He had a couple books he’d found online, a copy of the _Eddas_, and Google. He could do it.

He spent most of the class mentally playing “Rorschach” with blood spatter patterns and wondering how he could get in touch with his new stalker. It felt kind of weird to admit, but he actually kind of wanted to thank the guy. Ramen was getting old, he was too busy to get a part-time job, and county sheriffs pulled in surprisingly little money as compensation. He vaguely wondered if he should be a bit more freaked out about having a stalker, but then a spatter pattern reminded him of a puppy eating a butterfly and he tuned back in to the lecture.

That night, he pulled out his rune reference books, his copies of the _Eddas_, and his Google-fu to translate something on his own. He didn’t need Lydia for this. He could handle it.

The runes turned out to be Younger Futhark. They spelled out an advertisement for a 6-week class series on runes and warding, no magical training necessary. It listed the name of a local new age shop. That was it. No contact information. No times. No dates. He looked the shop up online. There was still twenty minutes until they closed for the night, so he called and told the person who answered that he’d found an advertisement for a class series he’d be interested in taking on runes, and then he had to call the store owner’s personal cell because the employee had no idea what he was talking about but “sometimes the owner does things without telling anyone else about it because he’s kind of flaky” and apparently this particular employee harbored no problems at all giving out his boss’s personal phone number.

The class was free to those interested, and he was interested, and it started in a couple of weeks. It would take up his entire weekend for that whole six weeks, but it sounded intensive enough that he wouldn’t feel terrible not socializing. He went ahead and signed himself up, telling the store owner that he would totally be down for going on a mailing list about any upcoming trainings and classes. He called Scottie after that, who was totally pumped that Stiles was going to be learning all about warding and told him he’d be pretty amazing at it. That was why Scott was still his best friend.

The next morning, he got up forty-five minutes earlier than usual and stopped at McDonald’s on his way to class, hoping his stalker would be pacified. 

He ate breakfast every morning for the next two weeks. He had to admit that it did help his concentration and his will to do homework and class reading in his down time in the morning. He went to his first warding class on Saturday. By that Saturday night, he’d gone through two sticks of chalk, every rune in the Elder Futhark (repeatedly), two sets of flashcards, and the last few firing brain cells he had left after a week of Charlotte Bronte. He stopped at McDonald’s for a Big Mac on the way home. He figured his stalker would understand.

He managed to get all of four hours of sleep Saturday night, because the class was not a short one. He woke up Sunday morning at the time he was supposed to be leaving for the shop to the chorus of P!nk’s “Walk of Shame” blaring from his phone on a loop. He cursed, dismissed the alarm, threw on the same clothes he’d worn the day before, and hauled his bike out of the apartment. Another envelope was taped to his front door. His name was again spelled out in magazine cut-out letters. He grabbed it and stuffed it in his back pocket before racing off to the shop. Breakfast was going to have to wait, because apparently runes waited for no man.

It wasn’t until lunch that day that he was able to get around to the envelope in his pocket. He ripped it open and pulled out another letter, this one with a quarter slip of paper folded into it. The slip of paper was a gift certificate to the shop he was in. The gift certificate said it was good for $300. His stalker was rich. And generous. Holy shit. 

He read the paper, which this time was just a typed letter:

_Well done with breakfast, Stiles. Keep this up, and I may have to reward you. Doesn’t life feel better when you eat at the beginning of the day? Don’t worry about skimping on items to save money on the card. I’ll keep it filled up—at least until you’ve grown up a little and discovered that you actually have taste and standards that are more precise than fast food and curly fries. _

_I knew you would handle those runes, and I hope you enjoy this course. I suspect it will further you quite a bit in your supernatural endeavors. You may even surprise yourself a time or two. I’ve included a gift certificate for this shop with this little letter of encouragement. Please note it should be used for reference books to further your studies and any supplies you may need for your warding class specifically. Don’t get distracted and buy herbs or shiny crystals. Warding only. (And books, because I know how much you love your books, and I would never want to deprive you of joys in life.)_

_Keep up the work, you brilliant, beautiful boy_. 

That was…kind of sweet, actually. His stalker was willing to keep him in food and books. And chalk. He was going to need SO much chalk for this fucking class. He used up another couple of sticks and bought a box of forty white chalk sticks before he left that night. He considered stopping and using his gift card to buy food on his way home, but his stalker was pretty specific about when he should use it, and he’d already cheated the night before. This person was being really nice, and he wanted them to know that he appreciated it. He ate ramen over his kitchen sink at 3 am instead. 

Juggling the warding class and all his school work wasn’t easy, but he managed it for the next five weeks. He’d even finished two essays for his psych 201 class that weren’t due till closer to end of term and read through the $150 worth of books he’d bought from the new age shop. Ray, the owner, had helped him pick the books out based on the interests he’d talked about during the class. There had been one or two interesting people in the class with him, but they stayed too busy to exchange information during class time and he had no free time to hang out with anyone. He’d only talked to his dad about once a week since the class started. The last time he’d talked to Scott on the phone was the night he’d signed up for the warding class. 

His roommates turned out to be absolutely awesome, though. The four of them had started a little routine of taking turns fixing meals for a day for all four of them and just leaving them in the fridge to be eaten whenever. A sort of natural roster started in place, and by midterms, he was only eating ramen over his kitchen sink in the wee hours of the morning occasionally. He’d even confronted his vamp roommate about what he was. Kyle turned out to be 675 years old. He was an absolute expert in blood magic. It was apparently another discipline that non-magical people could still partake of. Kyle promised to show him the basics when his warding class was over. 

The letters from his stalker came at regular intervals. They were all encouraging. They all pointed out all the great things he was doing. Some of them commented on something he was reading for his English class, some of them laughed about the inanities of the gender studies class he was taking (_Why is gender so important to you people? Who actually gives a shit about the genitalia attached to a person’s body? The person is more important than the body, isn’t it? A person is multi-faceted, complex. Genitalia is simply procreation_). Some of them complimented the new pair of dress slacks he’d picked up on sale somewhere or the fancier shoes he’d bought on clearance. Gift cards for clothing stores and music stores and Barnes & Noble started showing up, each one with specific instructions on what types of items he was to spend the money on. He honored the instructions, because he was quickly learning that his stalker knew what they were talking about. He got sweaters made of cashmere and dress slacks made of linen and undershirts made of some type of silk. It all seemed completely indulgent and ridiculous when he was purchasing them, but he had to admit that they felt amazing against his overly sensitive skin. He ended up wearing the undershirts almost constantly. He went into an actual tailor’s shop and got a bespoke suit. He hadn’t even known what a bespoke suit was before that letter. He got music from Indian Bollywood artists, Scandinavian folk music, salsa and Latin fusion music. He read books by Confucius and Plutarch, made his way through Don Quixote in Spanish, bought a leatherbound, oversize edition of _Grimm’s Fairy Tales_. He wondered if his stalker wanted to be his sugar…parent. He wondered if he’d mind having one.

When mid terms were completed and his warding class was done, he collapsed onto his brand new Egyptian cotton 500 thread count sheets and slept for three days straight. He studied the basics of blood magic with Kyle when his other roommates weren’t looking. He’d learned late in his warding class that he was actually innately magical. Deaton had spouted off that nonsense about everyone having a spark back in high school, but he learned that he had far more than a spark. By the end of the class, his activated wards could be used for offense against supernatural creatures and his latent defensive wards could keep even Ray out, and he couldn’t quite figure out what Ray even was. 

When he woke up from his three-day nap, he found another letter from his stalker congratulating him on his hard work and a $600 gift certificate for Amazon. The letter said he’d worked hard and focused enough on breakfast that he deserved a little reward, so he could buy whatever he wanted. He had to count his fingers to make sure he was awake. He’d just been handed $600 to spend on whatever he pleased from an online store that sold EVERYTHING. He bought a PS4, an accessory pack, all his favorite FPSes, and a few new fantasy RPGs he’d been wanting to play. 

He wrote a letter of his own after confirming the “Thank you for your purchase” screen on his dream cart. He took a cue from his stalker and pasted little letters on the front of the envelope reading _For my stalker. Roommates, leave this here or I’ll kill you in your sleep_.

Two days later, his letter was gone. The day after that, a new envelope waited for him. It was kind of like that time in third grade when he’d written to an address on the back of a comic book and gotten himself a pen pal from Italy, only this time the pen pal was apparently loaded and concerned for his health and well being. He was just as excited about a new letter now as he had been then, and now he could apparently WRITE BACK.

_Stiles,_

_Thank you for the kind words and the gratitude, but I assure you they aren’t necessary. I have a bit more than I need, and I actually enjoy sharing it with others. You’ve been so good about following my directions, too. You didn’t have to follow them—I absolutely would have continued spending money on you, because I enjoy that look of wonder you get on your face when you realize that you get nice things, too—but you chose to follow them. You still choose to follow them. (I know how much you love your video games and how big an indulgence you find them to be. The fact that you spent your reward money on something you honestly feel is a reward didn’t escape my attention.) I love how willing you are to indulge me, to take direction from me even though I know how headstrong and independent you are. Thank you for that. That honest reaction is all I want in return. The truth is that I fancy myself a bit of a provider. If that translates to your mind as being a sugar daddy for you, I suppose I am, but the bottom line is that I have more, and you have always dealt with less, and maybe I feel it’s time that somebody takes care of you for a change._

_You look very happy in DC. You seem brighter, somehow. Maybe it’s your magic shining through, but I somehow doubt it. I think the big city suits you. I think you needed bigger crowds to stand out in, and I like to hope that maybe you’re finally finding yourself among this sea of beings. You should consider staying in a city like this more permanently. Beacon Hills drains you, and I love seeing you exuberant and full of life._

_Do pay attention to Ray’s list of offered classes. The man is an absolute genius in all things magical, and you always were a good student. Enjoy your video games. Write often._

He did write often. His stalker—his MALE stalker—wrote back every time. The man was clearly older—he was well versed in politics from both sides of the fence, he knew his way around supernatural knowledge, he loved Renaissance art and Wagner, and he could debate circles around Stiles. 

Stiles may have fallen a little bit in love with him. Stiles may have jumped off a cliff headfirst and screaming into love with the guy. He didn’t feel right calling the guy his stalker anymore. “Stalker” implied something much more creepy than he felt was going on. Halfway through the second half of his first semester, he just switched to referring to the guy as Daddy. It didn’t feel weird or kinky. It actually made him feel kind of warm inside, so he just went with it. Daddy didn’t seem to mind, even switching to calling Stiles “Baby Boy.” Nothing about their letters was overly sexual. It didn’t feel like a kink. 

Around the time Stiles would have gone home for fall break, Ray put out a new list of classes offered. The week of his fall break, Ray was holding a special-invitation-only seminar with a guest speaker known worldwide for healing magic. Ray’s email said Stiles had a special invitation if he wanted it. Stiles wanted it. The only problem was that the email said to call about prices, and Stiles knew that special seminars with world-renowned guest speakers wouldn’t be covered by the $150 store credit he still had. He called Ray to see if there was any way he could work the rest of the price off (probably for the rest of his life). Ray told him not to worry about it, the cost was covered. Stiles smiled at the phone and told Ray to put him down as a yes, then.

He left a message in an envelope on his door that simply said, “Thanks, Daddy.”

The note in the envelope he found in return told him to take notes because Daddy wanted to hear all about it. He called his dad and Scott to let them know that he wasn’t going to make it home for Thanksgiving. His dad told him he’d had to pick up a double on Thanksgiving because the new deputy originally scheduled had just had a baby, so he was relieved. Scott was annoyed, but Stiles explained that this was going to increase his magical ability and ultimately help the pack, so his bro from another mo eventually grumbled about that probably being a good thing.

The seminar was astounding. The healer could do things with herbs that Stiles didn’t know possible. Mistletoe could actually heal in certain situations. Belladonna could be used for things as mundane as stress relief. But it was more than that, more than just the herbs. The man could manipulate line energy or pull on the elements to physically heal wounds. He pulled from the earth to heal a paper cut in front of the whole room. And then he went on to EXPLAIN HOW TO DO IT. There were diagrams and flow charts and everything. Runes and circles and rituals and spell chants. For five days, Stiles immersed himself in the art of healing. He learned woods that would heal and barks that would harm. He learned basic potions to protect and poisons to damage. He literally lived at Ray’s shop the entirety of fall break. He slept on a couch in the corner of the shop. He ate food catered into the event. He’d turned his phone off an hour into the very first seminar and didn’t turn it on until he arrived back at his apartment the night before classes started again. He could use air and fire to physically fix somebody.

The first thing he did when he got home was transcribe all his notes and recordings and charts and graphs and recipes into a folder on his laptop. It took him six hours, but he got it done. He printed off a copy, stuffed it and a short note telling Daddy what a great time he had and how much he’d learned and thanking the man again into an envelope, taped it to his front door, and then collapsed onto his bed. Kyle had apparently washed his sheets while he was out. He could kiss that vampire.

The semester resumed. He learned blood magic from Kyle. He played Call of Duty and Halo with his roommates. He went to lectures and classes. He took two seminars on ley line magic and and a two-week course on ritual creation and preparation. He wrote letters to his daddy. He talked a lot about himself over the next month. He talked about the loss of his mother and how he’d felt like he’d lost his father at the same time. Daddy told him all about several losses in his life, including the loss of his own son, in return. He told him about being the only human in a pack of wolves, and how he felt completely inferior, more an outcast than all those people who didn’t know about the supernatural because he was kept on the fringes for so much of the fighting, like he couldn’t be trusted anymore to keep himself safe. He talked about how far away he felt from Scott, how much they’d drifted in high school and just never got back to with each other. He told him about the time Scott had actually believed that he’d been a murderer, how low he felt. Then he wrote something he’d never admitted to out loud before: He said that maybe killing somebody else on purpose wasn’t the worst thing a person could do. He’d had a lot of time to think over the years about death and ethics and just what he’d do to protect loved ones. If someone was hurting those he loved, would he really sit back and do nothing? He’d wanted to kill Theo. He’d planned to kill Theo. He could have gotten away with it. He hadn’t, though—not because killing Theo was morally or ethically wrong in his eyes, but because he didn’t want to lose Scott completely. He couldn’t take that chance. Was he any better in that instance than someone who went through with it and actually killed the person who had wronged so many someone cared about? He would have done it if Scott hadn’t been so morally righteous. Was he a better person than a killer because he had friends he couldn’t stand to lose? If someone were to kill Scott, Stiles would hunt them down and murder them without a second thought. He knew that. Did that make him a bad person?

His daddy chastised him in return. The man told him that he was too good a person to go down that road, that of course he was better than someone who’d actually committed premeditated murder because he’d found that one thing that held him back. He’d abstained, and in the end, that was all the moral high ground he needed to stay the good, pure person his daddy knew he was. He’d told Stiles that committing murder probably WASN’T the worst thing a person could do, but that he worked with criminals every day (his daddy was part of law enforcement or the judicial system, which was something new he’d learned about the man), and premeditated murder changed a person. He’d made Stiles promise that if he ever found himself in a position where planning and killing someone felt necessary to him, he’d tell Daddy and let him handle the situation, because Daddy never wanted him to have to change. 

It was the single sweetest thing anyone had ever said to him. This guy, this physical stranger who knew him so intimately, had basically just said that Stiles was too good a person to ever have to lose his soul, and this guy would do whatever he had to in order to make sure that Stiles could keep his soul intact. Nobody had ever offered him that before. Nobody had ever even stopped to realize that he’d been giving away pieces of his soul just to keep up with everyone as time went on. He thought of Derek Hale, who had lost parts of his soul to a fire that he’d felt complicit in, then to deaths that he didn’t commit but still played a part in creating. He wondered how much he’d changed in the years since they’d really seen each other, actually talked. Derek was a good guy who’d been handed a shit life. What if he’d had someone to step in and handle it for him?

He thought of Peter Hale, whom he hadn’t actually talked to since the time in the train station with the Hunt. Peter Hale, who had killed so many with so much purpose, who never seemed to regret any of his actions. He wondered what Peter was like before the fire. When did he lose his soul? 

He told Daddy that sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, if it was dark enough in his bedroom, he could still feel the nogitsune crawling around in the back of his brain. He knew it wasn’t physically there, that it had been put back into its box and was hopefully rotting somewhere dark and cold, but he could feel it back there, a niggling sensation that was like a remnant of power. He didn’t know what to do with it. He told Daddy that he still randomly stopped to count his fingers, that he still felt trapped in nightmares.

Two days before semester finals started, Ray called him on the phone and asked him what he was doing the first week of winter break. He’d planned on going home. Ray told him about a one-week course he’d convinced a warlock to teach on shadow magic that week, and that Stiles had a spot in the course if he’d wanted it. Of course he wanted it, so he rearranged his schedule and signed on. Scott threatened to head out there and hang for that week if Stiles wasn’t coming home, but he promised to live in Scotty’s pocket for the remaining three weeks of winter break, so in the end he shipped back the things he’d need in Beacon Hills for a month and headed over to his couch in the shop. The course was taught in fourteen-hour days for seven days straight. For those who’d paid extra, which apparently included him, the warlock offered tutoring sessions and practical labs for another four hours after the day of coursework. After that, he slept like the dead for five hours straight and then woke up on the couch and started again. He took careful notes, outlined practices, and wrote down hypotheses and actual results. Daddy liked it when he was detailed, and he liked Daddy. Besides, he discovered early on in this magical education that the more he noted and documented, the more he remembered. He could still draw the correct combination of runes to ward against any situation from memory, and he’d already forgotten half of psych 201, which he’d just finished seven days ago, so the details were working.

It wasn’t until his plane back to Beacon Hills had almost landed that he realized he had no way of contacting his daddy until he got back to DC. He should have left a letter for him before he took off, but thirty-five hours of sleep in seven days was absolutely exhausting, and surely the guy would understand. He was sorry he wouldn’t be able to communicate with the guy on Christmas, though. Christmas was usually both fun and lonely for him, and he’d have liked a new letter to keep him busy. The guy might not even celebrate Christmas, though. He could celebrate Channukah or Kwanzaa or any number of religions, really. Still. At least he had three weeks with his dad and Scott. He didn’t know what pack activities would look like, what with him and Lyds still being not so great. The combination of both his exes in the same room might be enough to bring him to tears. He wondered if Derek would be back in town. Scott had mentioned that Derek had come through a couple of times. It might be nice to catch up with him. Last time he’d seen the wolf, Derek had been traveling the world. It sounded nice. He loved history and culture, and it had always been a dream of his to visit other countries. Maybe he still could someday. He had skills now. If he kept working on them, he might be able to save up enough to spend a summer in Eastern Europe or Mongolia or somewhere. Maybe it wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg to travel with a tribe of nomads across the Sahara desert or something. That would be awesome. He’d heard good things about Morocco. Antarctica had penguins. He’d have to remember to ask Daddy if he’d ever traveled to other countries when he got back to DC. He was willing to bet the man had. His writing suggested he was the kind of snob who traveled all over. He was willing to bet the man had never even stepped foot in a hostel, either. It was probably all chauffeured cars and five-star hotels, which was just fine for a luxury vacation, but no way to actually experience a CULTURE. He wanted to see how people really lived, what they really ate, how they really worshiped. He was willing to bet it would be a great exercise to help connect further with the elements, too. The shadow warlock and the healer had both introduced him to working with the elements, and they seemed like they would be really powerful tools and allies. He texted Ray as soon as the plane taxied into the gate to ask about the possibility of setting up a class series on the four elements. It was something the dude would probably love. The man was a planner.

His dad met him at baggage claim and grabbed him so tight he had trouble breathing for just a second. At least, he was totally going with the idea that the hug was too tight. He hadn’t actually seen his dad since he’d left for DC in August. It was a long time for him to stay gone. He blinked back the suspicious wetness in his eyes and thumped his dad on the back a couple of times, then they separated and walked back out to his dad’s cruiser. Beacon Hills didn’t look to have changed at all in the months he’d been gone, and it felt good to be back, but it seemed so empty. The streets were quiet, the sidewalks were sparsely populated, and the storefronts all looked clean and homey. It was the same Beacon Hills, but he’d gotten used to noise. DC was always noisy. It was always bright. The atmosphere matched his brain, and he could think better. His thoughts always seemed to whizz by too fast in his hometown. He was always moving when everything around him was still. After the week he’d just had, though, a little bit of quiet and stillness might just serve him well. 

He took in his dad while the man drove them home. He looked good, like maybe he’d lost some weight. His hair was trimmed, and that sweater he was wearing looked new. His face looked less stressed, too. Overall, Stiles was very pleased to see it. His dad had sounded good every time he’d talked to him, but having the physical proof calmed something in Stiles’s gut that he hadn’t even realized had been roiling. 

“So, Dad, you seeing anyone lately? You’re looking like you might be.” 

His dad smirked in his direction, and he just grinned back. 

“I might be, kid. What’s it to ya?”

HA! His dad WAS seeing someone. This was an exciting little development in the life of a small town. “Whoozzit? Whoozzit? Is it Mel? Are you and Mel dating? Please tell me you and Mel are dating!” It would be so sweet if Scott’s mom and his dad got together. Then he and Scott could be actual brothers, and that would be awesome. 

His dad laughed. “Nah, Mel and Chris are still doing their thing, and it’s actually a pretty good thing.”

That did not answer his question. He wondered if his father was purposefully avoiding his question, and if he was, why. “That is not an answer to the first question, father mine. Who ya dating?”

His father snorted and turned onto their street. “Who you dating?”

He was definitely purposefully avoiding Stiles’s question. However, it was an exciting question for him to answer, because he wasn’t entirely sure how to answer it. He should probably address the situation with his dad, anyway. It was a pretty damn good story, he thought. “Well, I’m not really DATING anyone, old man. I’ve got a pen pal, though, and that’s going pretty well, actually.” He had a pen pal he’d never actually met. He had a pen pal whose name he didn’t even know. He had a pen pal who knew his schedule and address and the fact that he ran with wolves. He had a pen pal he was truly, madly, deeply, head over heels in love with at this point. He just had to figure out what that actually meant.

His dad pulled into the driveway and shut the car off before looking over at him. “A pen pal?”

It wasn’t that difficult a concept. “Yes, Dad, a pen pal. You know, a person you exchange letters with over time? One of those. He’s a pretty decent guy, and I might be into meeting him in person and seeing where things could go.”

“What’s his name?”

_Daddy._ “We, uh, don’t actually use our real names. A safety thing. You know.” He flailed with a hand, hoping his dad would accept his answer. It was a safety-conscious thing to do. It made sense to do things that way. Stiles would never actually do that, but maybe his dad would be willing to let him have this.

“How do you know the letters are yours, then?”

Jesus, what was with his dad and this sudden logic? Since when was logic a thing they did outside of case work? “Our addresses and the words ‘pen pal.’ It gets the point across pretty well. And stop avoiding the question. Who are you dating?”

“How did you get this guy’s information, then?”

He didn’t have this guy’s information. He could tell his dad what Daddy dreamed about at night, what his favorite colors were and why, the fact that they both understood the deep chasm of loneliness that being surrounded by people could elicit, that the guy liked Wagner and detested Brittney Spears, but he couldn’t offer a name, a location, or a phone number. That should probably bother him more than it did.

“He wrote to me first, actually.”

His dad threw his hands up. “Well, then, how did he get your information?”

He apparently stalked Stiles until he felt comfortable leaving a ransom-demand type letter taped to an envelope on his front door that Stiles had been worried might carry anthrax or something. Stiles shrugged. “Off a website I’d submitted to looking for people in DC to befriend when I first moved to DC last year, I think. We didn’t talk about it a whole lot, Dad. Look, he’s really nice, and I haven’t gotten a creepy vibe off him even once—” Except that time he was worried about the guy being a stalker who might murder him with a bio weapon. “And we’ve both been totally safe in our communications and I kinda want to meet him for real, okay? Enough with the dad questions. It’s my turn to grill you. Now spill.”

His dad laughed and got out of the car. He grabbed his laptop bag and followed. Maybe a beer would loosen some lips, here.

~~~

His dad was dating some secretary over at the mayor’s office. The whole thing was apparently pretty hush-hush for some reason completely unknown to Stiles, but if it made his dad happy, he was happy. His dad said that the thing was too new for him to bring her home to Stiles, but her name was Anna. It had taken Stiles exactly five minutes on his laptop to find her online. She was pretty in a librarian sort of way. Her facial features suggested being around his age, and her Facebook page confirmed this. She was also apparently into salsa dancing and happy hour at Applebee’s. He wasn’t entirely too sure what these proclamations said about her. He let it go, though. At least his dad knew his paramour’s name.

He’d slept in his childhood bed for about four days straight, just long enough for the dark circles under his eyes to fade enough for him to pass as a human again, and then Scott had come over and leapt on his bed and woken him up for an all-day Final Fantasy gaming marathon that actually lasted for forty-eight hours straight and ended in squawking and throwing of controllers and Cheeto dust ground into his bedroom carpet. Damn, but it was good to be home again.

Then it was Christmas Eve and his dad had to work because of that same deputy with the newborn and he found himself yet again putting the tree and stockings up by himself. He missed the tinsel on the banisters and the mistletoe in the doorway and the ornaments in the windows and all the fanfare of Christmas they used to have in this house, back when mom was around. He missed the piles of homemade presents and the mounds of cookies and the homemade ice cream. It used to be a really big time in his life. 

He’d just gotten the star on the top of the tree when his phone buzzed with a new notification. It was a text, and the number it came from was not one he recognized. It was a DC area code. He sat down on the couch and read the message.

_Merry Christmas, Baby Boy. I hope all your stockings are hung by the chimney with care._

He about dropped the damn phone. The man had just texted him. From a phone. With a phone number attached to it. Did his daddy just give him some contact information? Was the man PSYCHIC?! That would explain so many things.

**Daddy?**

It never hurt to be sure.

_Did you tell Santa what you wanted for Christmas? How was your week-long intensive?_

Holy shit. He could still talk to his guy while he was home. He loved this man so much.

**It was absolutely fantastic. The warlock was an amazing talent, and he knew how to guide us through physical exercises so we got a lot out of it. I have all sorts of notes for you, but I’m not in DC, which I suspect you already know.**

Maybe he’d get an email address, too.

**I told my dad about you. Sort of. I didn’t have a name to give him.**

He drummed his fingers against the arm of the couch. Maybe he shouldn’t have suggested wanting a name. They had a really, really great thing going, and he shouldn’t have pushed. What if the guy doesn’t answer? Maybe he had a reason for not sharing his information. Stiles had time to rummage around for the remote control, turn on the TV, and find _National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation_ on TBS and Daddy still hadn’t answered him.

Dennis Quaid was just letting Chevy Chase know the shitter was full when his phone finally buzzed again. He held his breath and opened his texts.

_Did you, now? What did you tell him?_

Well, he didn’t tell him that he called the man Daddy. He didn’t tell him that Daddy liked to spoil his Baby Boy. He didn’t tell him that Daddy supported him more mentally and emotionally than anyone at home ever did. He didn’t tell him that he was insanely in love with Daddy.

**I told him that we were pen pals and that I wanted to meet you in person.**

_Oh, I love that, darling. I can be your pen pal. Get through midterms this coming semester, and I’ll arrange a meeting. But keep your GPA up, Baby Boy. Parents of all kinds value a good education._

Daddy just suggested they meet at midterms. He could meet this man in just a few months. He didn’t even care how old this guy was at this point. He could be eighty-five and Stiles was pretty sure he would still climb this dude like a tree. He was good at grades, if that was really a thing.

**I am good with grades, Daddy. You know that already, because I’m fairly certain you’re psychic. I’m holding you to a midterm meeting.**

He was going to meet his guy in early March. He could make it to early March. He needed a drink.

His dad hadn’t picked up any Coke before he got home. He sighed and got a glass of tap water. His phone buzzed.

_I’m not psychic, baby. I just know you. Now, did you tell Santa what you want for Christmas?_

How far did he want to push this tonight? There were a number of ways he could answer that question. He strongly suggested the man actually wanted to know what kind of presents he would request for Christmas, but he was REALLY not feeling that answer.

**I was super busy this last month, Daddy. I haven’t had time to sit on ANYBODY’s lap this whole time.**

He gulped his water down and debated taking this text string up to his bedroom. Chevy Chase was not anybody’s kind of spank porn, after all, and tonight seemed like a good night for Christmas miracles. 

_Well, why don’t you sit down on my lap like the good boy you are and tell me, then?_

And there they were. He headed upstairs, already half hard in his jeans.

**I would, but I squirm around a lot. You probably already know that.**

He kicked the door to his room shut and unbuttoned his jeans with one hand.

_I could hold you in place._

Oh, dear god, there was that manhandling kink he’d pushed down since high school. Hello, Old Faithful.

**I’d like that, Daddy. I’d like that a lot. I’d be a very good boy for you.**

He tossed his phone onto his bed and shimmied out of his jeans. They were too tight for all this. His phone buzzed on his bed, so he stepped out of the jean puddle on the floor and fell onto the bed, picking his phone back up and getting himself comfortable against his pillows.

_I’m sure you would be, baby. But I’d still make you answer my question before I’d do more than hold you in my lap._

He could do description sexting. If his man wanted him to text out all the things he wanted him to do, he could do that. He liked to use his words.

**What I really want for Christmas probably couldn’t be put in a box and gift wrapped. I’m betting it’s big enough to wrap in a bow, though. Would Santa wrap it in a bow for me, I wonder? Could I get it while you’re holding me down?**

He regretted for just half a second not packing emergency lube in his carry on. There was absolutely no way his dad had any.

_You’re being a naughty boy, Stiles. I’m inquiring about presents you’d like to see under your tree, and you’re not answering me. How can I get you what you want if you don’t tell me?_

Now he was thinking about Daddy spanking him. That could be fun, too, although pain for pleasure wasn’t really his thing. He’d had enough pain during high school, thank you very much. But he could enjoy the hand of the guy he loved. That could work.

**Are you going to have to spank my bottom now? I don’t mean to be naughty. I could stick out my lower lip and pout. You could spank my ass until it’s all loose and relaxed and then give me my Christmas present.**

He licked his lower lip and reached into his boxers. His phone buzzed.

_I am not doing this with you right now, Stiles. Get your hand out of your pants._

Holy shit. His daddy was totally psychic. 

**But Christmas sexting, Daddy! Don’t you want me to hang my stocking? You could trim my tree!**

This was probably not the best way to get his guy to let him talk about rimming and rubbing, but these gems were too good to pass up.

_If you would ever like me to trim your tree, ever, you will get your hand out of your pants and tell Santa what you’d like for Christmas._

Ugh, this guy was like Ebenezer Scrooge. And now he was was imagining Christmas Carol porn.

He fingered at his head just a little.

But Daddy could be psychic. Like, psychics were a thing that actually existed. They were rare, but they were out there in the world.

He sighed and pulled his hand from his pants. He was really looking forward to this guy trimming his tree.

**Your cock.**

If he wasn’t getting any guided self-love tonight, he was going to get some enjoyment out of this, and he could get timely responses now.

_Be. Good._

**Oh, Daddy, I’m good. I’m very, very good.**

_I swear to the seven holy hells, Stiles, things are not going to go the way you want them if you don’t start behaving again. Bad boys don’t get big cocks._

His dick twitched into the next area code. His Daddy was an older man in some sort of law-enforcing capacity who enjoyed the finer things in life and HAD A BIG COCK. Now he was getting somewhere.

**Just you, Daddy. I just want you.**

He set the phone down on the bed next to him and waited a few minutes for a reply. Nothing came through. He pulled his boxers down and waited a few more minutes. Still not phone buzz. He wrapped a hand around his cock and eyed his phone suspiciously for half a minute. Nothing. So he jerked himself off, cleaned himself up, and turned the lights off through the house before going to bed. He left the tree lit and sparkling in the dim living room. He thought of his mom. He thought of trimming trees and kissing his Daddy under the mistletoe. He imagined a future where his husband hugged him from behind and kissed him as he hang the last stocking on the chimney. He wondered if Daddy wanted kids. He wondered if he wanted kids. He could probably ask now. He had a phone number. Shit, he could probably call that phone number to wish his one true love a Merry Christmas tomorrow. 

He drifted off to sleep in his bed with thoughts of doing just that in the morning. 

He woke up in the morning to a text from the number he’d saved as Pen Pal (just in case) that simply read _You already have me, Stiles_.

He dialed that number, but nobody answered. Daddy hadn’t even have a voicemail box set up. He pouted and texted back **Then why didn’t you answer your phone?**

He’d exchanged gifts with his dad, with Scott and with Mel, and even with Chris Argent and had sat down to a Christmas feast before his phone buzzed with a reply.

_Merry Christmas, love. Enjoy your time with your family._

The rest of his break was spent in a flurry of Halo and Call of Duty and World of Warcraft and Scott and movies with dad and more Scott and then more Scott. A large portion of the rest of his break was also spent with Malia, because she and Scott were still surprisingly a very strong thing, and with Mason, who was no longer with Corey but still completely into fashion and design. He didn’t know his Gucci from his Versace, but he thought the kid had some serious talent. Mason had allowed him to take some screenshots of some of his designs to send “to a good friend” (which received a wink and several nudges from Mason, but no deep, delving inquiries), and he texted them to Daddy to brag to someone who actually cared about how things looked about his friend. It was cool, okay?

Daddy agreed that Mason had real potential, which he shared. If all went well, next year maybe Mason would go to design school with the right encouragement.

The day before he was scheduled to head back to DC, he was in the middle of wrestling Scott for the last peanut M&M when his phone buzzed. He let Scott have the M&M, even though he’d already licked it, and checked his phone to find a message saying that Daddy was looking forward to having his Baby Boy back in town. He must have smiled at it, because Scott tilted his head.

“Dude, you smell weird” was all Scott said. Stupid fucking werewolf noses. He’d forgotten about that whole smelling-emotions thing most all of his friends could do. 

“Nah, man. It’s fine. Just got some good news.” He pocketed his phone.

“Bullshit! You smell like you used to smell around Lydia when we were in high school. You smell like lust and teenage boy right now, Stiles. Who was the text from?” Scott reached out to try and swipe his phone from his pocket. He laughed.

“No way, Scotty. You’re gonna have to wait to find out.”

Scott pouted at him. “Why? Come on, man! We’re bros! Who is she? Where’d you meet? Is it serious?”

He smiled. He should tell Scott something. He’d mentioned it to his dad, after all. 

“It’s super new, Scott. I think it’s serious—it feels serious—but I’m not at the screaming it into the universe stage just yet, man. He’s a really nice guy, though, and I really like him.”

Scott blinked a couple of times and then smiled that sunshine smile at Stiles. “You like him, huh? You gonna at least tell me his name, then?”

He found himself torn between not getting judged and wanting to gross his best friend out completely. In the end it still felt too private to share with even Scott. 

“You’ll get a name when I’m ready to make things public. It’s…complicated, man. We’re taking it super slow, and he’s really amazing with everything, but it’s not something I want to share with people right now. I promise that you and dad will be some of the first to know more about him, though, okay?”

Scott punched him in the arm and said that was fine and then they marathoned _Die Hard_ until they’d both passed out from sugar crashes and the awesomeness that was John McClane. He caught his early-morning flight the next morning, promising his dad they’d call more and he’d be careful with his new “fellow” and he’d be careful with the magic stuff and that he’d focus on his education.

By the time he’d made it back to his apartment, it was early evening, he was starving, and he hadn’t heard from Daddy all day. 

A greeting card envelope was taped to the door. It bulged slightly. His name stared at him in ransom-demand letters. He blinked and removed the envelope, ripping it open and tipping it over. 

A set of car keys attached to a single key fob fell out of his hand. A folded piece of paper floated to the floor in front of him. He grabbed it and read the typed note:

_Dearest,_

_These keys are not your Christmas present. They are a gift for acing your classes last semester. Good things come to good boys, as I told you. Go down to your garage and head to spot LL 132. These keys should allow you access to what is waiting there for you. I love you, and I’m proud of your hard work so far. You have exceeded absolutely all of my expectations._

He stuck his carry on inside the apartment door and ran to the elevator, punching the button for the lower level. Daddy liked to spend money on him, but surely he didn’t…

Stiles’s heart might have picked up a bit at the idea of his daddy getting him a car because he’d made the Dean’s List this past semester. His father had been impressed he’d done as well as he had, but always believed that good grades and a job well done were their own rewards. He’d never gotten gifts for doing well, and a CAR, well. It would be nice to not have to bike to campus and the shop in DC winters.

The elevator let him out, and he wandered the floor of the garage until he found LL 132 painted on the wall. In front of that space designation sat a shiny electric blue Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was almost the same color as the main body of his Jeep back home had been, but shinier and thicker. The windows were tinted, the plates were current, and a GWU parking permit and emission inspection sticker had already been stuck to his front windshield. 

Holy shit.

Another piece of folded paper sat tucked under one of the windshield wipers. His hand shook a bit as he took it and unfolded it.

_You haven’t even clicked the fob to unlock the car yet, have you? What are you waiting for? It’s yours, I promise._

He looked up from the note and clicked the button to unlock the car. It unlocked with a gentle beep and a flash of the lights. He looked back down at the note.

_You haven’t even clicked the fob to unlock the car yet, have you? What are you waiting for? It’s yours, I promise._

_I know it’s not exactly the right color, but apparently they stopped manufacturing that color paint in 2002. Who knew? Your Christmas present is sitting on the driver’s seat. The gift on the passenger seat is just because I love you and I want you to think of me fondly at all times. Now get that absolutely adorable ass of yours in your car and check things out. Then take your just-because present upstairs and think of me for at least twenty-five minutes._

It was an odd request, but instructions, requests, and directions written on these pieces of paper usually ended in happy times for him, so he shrugged and opened the driver’s door. A piece of coal sat on what was very probably a real leather seat. God, he was beyond in love with this man. What was the step after completely and totally gone on a person? Because he was there. He chucked the coal out onto the garage floor and brushed the gray leather off before climbing in and sitting behind the steering wheel. The interior of the Grand Cherokee was a soft gray color. He snapped a pic of the passenger seat and console off to Mason that read _what do you call this color gray_ before he slid the key into the ignition and cranked the engine. 

The car around him purred quietly to life. It was quieter in that cabin than any other car he’d ever been in. The dashboard lit up in soft white light, the center of the dash giving him electronic readouts about mileage and gas consumption, but the rest of the gauges still showed as meters. The tachometer idled at about five as he sat there with the engine on, taking in this brand new car, with exactly zero miles on it, that now belonged to him. The stereo system was a full on LED display MEDIA system. In a car that belonged to him. Complete with bluetooth to hook his phone to and built-in wifi. He owned a car that was wifi capable all by itself. Shit.

He opened the glove box and found the owner’s manual, what (given what he knew of his daddy) was probably a custom created log for car care and maintenance, a receipt for a year of unlimited data/month paid for on the car, five $50 gift cards to the car wash place down the street from his apartment, a current insurance card in his name for this car covering the next six months, the registration with only his name and address on it, and the _deed_ to the goddamn Jeep in his name and his name only. Not only was the car his, it was 100% his legally. 

He pulled out his phone and dialed Daddy’s number. There was still no voicemail box set up, so he texted the man.

**This is too much, Daddy. It’s beautiful and I love it, but I couldn’t possibly accept it. It’s too much.**

It was an absolutely beautiful SUV, complete with all-wheel drive and the capability to handle dirt and gravel. It had room to carry things, and it would survive road trips. He could hook a bike rack to the back. He could attach a hitch and haul shit with this baby. This was the type of car one purchased after a major promotion or life event. It was expensive and decked out. It was not the type of thing daddies got their kids for making the Dean’s List one semester of school, not even Daddies looking to spoil their Babies. He rested a hand on the steering wheel, which had a “heated” feature for cold winter driving, and wished desperately that he could keep it. He couldn’t though. This guy may enjoy being a provider, but buying a new car for some good grades was some next-level shit that didn’t sit right with Stiles’s pride. 

His phone buzzed.

_Then sell it and buy whatever you want with the money. You deserve nice things, Stiles. I will keep saying and acting on this until you start to believe me. Your GPA came in at a 3.9 this last semester. That was on top of dedicating yourself to learning four or five types of magic, baby. That is an incredible feat, and it doesn’t matter if “but you enjoyed doing that so it wasn’t hard.” It WAS hard. The average person could not achieve what you’ve achieved this last semester, love. They would have given up or gotten sick and dropped one activity or the other. Not only did you keep up with both, but you kept yourself fed and hydrated and as well rested as possible, and you found the time to keep in touch with your father. That is remarkable, and it deserves a remarkable reward._

He could feel the heat rising up his neck and cheeks. The corners of his mouth pulled up so far and so fast that it actually physically hurt a bit, but he couldn’t relax his smile. He was remarkable. Someone else had said that he was remarkable. Someone else had recognized the fact that his hard work was HARD work. His Daddy actually watched him, actually looked at him. His heart pounded in his chest, beating stronger and louder every time he thought about the message. He was above average. He was remarkable. He was…

Clutching his phone to his chest like a teenage girl or something.

He lowered his shoulders and exhaled to ground himself in the car. He had worked hard last semester. He had learned and practiced and even worked on who he was as a person. Daddy had plenty, the man had said. Daddy felt better when he could provide. Daddy was so, so good to him without actually expecting ANYTHING back, ever. Daddy didn’t even respond to his advances because the man apparently wanted to “do this right.” This gift, this car was Daddy’s way of showing his pride and admiration, when Stiles stopped to think about it. It wasn’t like they were at a stage where Daddy could show him off to his older friends and brag about his accomplishments. 

Maybe the guy hated the idea of Stiles biking to campus and the shop on snowy winter days as much as Stiles did. His nose twitched against his wishes. This man loved him. He wanted him warm and safe and comfortable. He was proud of him and was trying to show him that hard work could result in more than just internal pride. It was okay to rely on others for mental and emotional help; why shouldn’t it be okay to rely on trusted others for physical help when they were willing to offer it? Daddy had absolutely zero expectations toward him. Daddy made him feel capable and confident and respected his thoughts and opinions. Stiles was pretty certain that he could stop communicating with this man in two hours and the guy would just slink back into silent, harmless stalker mode. Daddy had even gone out and seen movies and read books that he’d recommended, and then they’d argued for weeks about themes and characters and the significance of plot points. 

Behind these notes was a man who wasn’t being a creepy, dominant jerk. This man who’d found him genuinely cared. He wanted safety and warmth and comfort for a person he cared about (and someday Stiles was going to ask him how he’d found him and why he’d cared so much in the first place).

He wanted the car. 

** I suppose you’re right. I did sort of earn something really nice. I’ll keep it and use it, but only if you promise me that thinking about me staying warm in it on winter days will bring a smile to your face.**

He slid all the documents except for the deed back into the glove box and closed it. His phone buzzed.

_You truly are magnificent, baby, and it thrills me that you’re really almost mine. Thank you for understanding me. I don’t think anyone else has ever done that. I love you deeper and harder with every day that passes. Now take your other present and go settle in for the night. Nine am classes start early. I’m shutting off this phone for the evening now. Be good, and enjoy your first day back tomorrow. Check in with Ray. Remember my directions regarding that other present._

He locked the screen on his phone with a quiet chuckle and turned to the gift wrapped box on the passenger seat. It wasn’t an overly large box, maybe about the height of an inkjet printer box and half the width. He grabbed it. It wasn’t overly heavy, but it had enough weight on it that it would drop like a stone if he let it go. He pulled the ribbon off, chucking it toward the passenger seat, and tore into the Christmas wrapping paper. Daddy had gotten him a brand new SUV AND a lump of coal. This could be anything, really.

The paper slid off a really beautiful wooden box. Vibrationally, it felt like ash wood. It thrummed in his fingers, and he let the energy of the wood into his body. It soothed and excited at the same time, skipping along his skin like an eager six year old girl. It felt good. He smiled and hummed his thanks to the wood, because Ray’s healer had told him to always thank nature for giving him what it wished to give.

The corners of the box were rounded, and the lid was hinged to the box in beautiful, well cared for brass. The lid was carved with delicate swirling and spiraling silver filigree work along the corners and sides. A smaller, rounded off rectangle was etched into the box on the inside of the filigree work. In the middle of all that stood a big, bold, deeply etched triskelion. A single claw—or maybe a fang—extended from the end of each spiral, etched in as boldly as the triskelion itself. With a lighter touch, but no less craftsmanship, each phase of the moon had been etched into the lid, almost making a little square of its own for the triskelion to sit in. Everything about it screamed “werewolf.” The ash wasn’t of the mountain ash variety, though, so this didn’t seem to be a box for protection. It wasn’t a box designed to keep people out. It was beautiful, though.

He opened the lid. The hinges made no noise, and the lid stayed open on its own. The letters HBH were engraved into the inside of the lid, but that was the only decoration there.

A piece of paper covered the contents of the box. It sat evenly, at any rate, just on the edges of what Stiles could see was royal blue velveteen material. He didn’t have to move the paper to read the printed note:

_You opened this in the Jeep, didn’t you? You were told to take it back to your room with you, and here you are, willfully disobeying those instructions. You’re a brat, but I love you anyway. Under this piece of paper, you will find a Christmas wish. READ THIS ENTIRE THING BEFORE YOU LOOK UNDER THE PAPER, STILES. I know you, and I have things to say before I lose you to the contents of this box. Even though you were being a very bad boy, Daddy still loves you and wants you to have everything your heart desires. Who knows, maybe if you’d been a very good boy on Christmas Eve you could have had the real thing on Christmas. (KEEP READING, STILES.)_

_This box has been in my family for ages. It’s one of the few things I have left of them, one of the few possessions I actually treasure. It was made by my great-great-great grandfather for his lover. He’d been committed to an arranged marriage just months before they met, but he loved this woman so much that he risked spite and wrath and the very likely possibility of an open war to be with her. He broke the commitment days before the marriage ceremony was due to be held. The woman’s family had been furious, and my family had to give up the land they’d held in Nevada to avoid an open war. Relations with that family have remained openly hostile since, but my forebear got the woman he loved in the end, and he went on to sire an absolutely huge brood of his own and cement the position of my family. He doted openly on his wife every day. His commitment and his loyalty were the only reasons I am here today to pass this box on to you, a treasure I can give to my treasure. _

_I want you to keep this piece of my past. I want you to know me. I plan on building my future with you._

_And now you may look under the paper. Twenty-five minutes with it, thinking of me. Remember that, Baby Boy. And click the lock button on the fob three times to set the car alarm, please._

He didn’t look under the paper. He closed the lid instead, running his hand over the engraving and burning, over the inlaid filigree and running through the story of the box’s creation in his mind. It was no wonder that the wood vibrated with eager joy. It was no wonder he wanted to skip away when he held it. This box WAS love. It was made with love, out of love, for love. He closed his eyes and touched the box with his own energy. He’d never really practiced psychometry before. He’d never really practiced any method of divination before—his life was going to be what it was going to be, whether he consulted the cards or cast the runes or scryed for advice over it. He didn’t need warnings or clarifications or advice to live that life. 

Still, this box was given to him for a REASON. “A treasure I can give to my treasure.” He wished it would give him more insight into the man that he was perfectly fine with building a future around him. 

The box radiated love and acceptance. It unfurled that place in his chest he reserved for his dad and for Scott, for pack. It reminded him of those nights getting drunk around a bonfire, the family bonds and they love of his friendships. An image of his mom and dad—the last image he’d ever had of the two of them together—sprang unbidden to the forefront of his thoughts.

His mom had already been sick. She’d been so sick, and everyone knew she wasn’t going to pull through from this one. Even Stiles’s young brain had understood that by that time. He remembered coming back from the snack machine to whine about it eating his quarters and then just standing at the door and staring at the scene before him. His dad was still on the chair he’d rarely left by the side of Mom’s bed, but he was bent just slightly over her. Both her hands were gripping his, and his dad was crying. His dad never cried. Stilinski men didn’t cry. He could hear his mom making the same shushing noises she made to him every time he tripped over air and skinned his knees. He could hear the loud hitches every time his dad tried to inhale. He watched his mom press a kiss to one side of his dad’s forehead, and then his dad openly sobbed. He heard his dad tell his mom, “I’ll ALWAYS love you. Always. It’s always been you,” and then his mom had seen him and pulled away from his dad, and that had been the end of that. 

_I’ll always love you…It’s always been you._

He opened his eyes and grinned. This guy was a werewolf. He had to be. He was an older male werewolf with deep ties to family who’d suffered the loss of loved ones. He was rich and involved in the judicial system in some way, very probably more a lawyer or judge than an enforcement officer, given the rich part and his ability to successfully stalk at the level he could. He had a taste for the finer things in life, and he was a provider and a natural romantic, apparently. He legitimately wanted Stiles to feel better about himself, and Stiles was pretty sure the man really loved him. Stiles was getting closer and closer to his answers. He turned the car off and grabbed the keys from the ignition, hugging the box to his chest with one arm. On his way back to the elevator, he clicked the lock button on the fob three times and heard the chirp of the car locking followed by the short whirl of the alarm activating. 

In his apartment, he grabbed his carry-on from its place beside the front door and walked into his bedroom. It appeared that none of his other roommates had gotten back yet. 

He kicked off his shoes and sat down on the bed, opening the box again. He glanced over the second half of the note again and smiled at the warmth in his stomach it elicited before taking it out of the box and setting it on the bed. 

Underneath where the note had been, nestled in royal blue velveteen, was the largest dildo Stiles had ever seen outside of those prank monstrosities and the massive double headers. It was big enough he was almost afraid to touch it. It looked realistic, the pinkish color a lot like his own dick took on when it was solid and aching. The dildo had what looked to be a foreskin thing on it. He’d never, ever seen a dildo with a foreskin. He’d never seen a dick with a foreskin. The whole idea of foreskin kind of freaked him out a little. It was weird, and the smallest thought of it reminded him of those tiny little dinosaurs in _Jurassic Park_ who’d spit on Nedry and then eaten him alive. This dildo had foreskin, though. It looked fairly smooth, only little bumpy lines running along it instead of those ridiculous overexaggerated veins on most of the dildos he’d ever seen. The thing had to be at least ten inches long, and the height on it, maybe a full inch, had him a bit scared of the girth of this thing.

He reached out and touched it. It felt like high-grade silicon, but it was firm like no toy he’d ever touched. Most of the toys he’d ever touched had a bit of a jellyish feel to them when you poked them. This one had no give. He grabbed it and pulled it out of its resting place. The thing had to be a couple inches wide. It was less a dildo and more a size queen’s wildest fantasy/nightmare. He could almost wield it like a light saber. It was firmer than any toys he’d handled. It didn’t bend at all. There was hardly any give when he tried to wiggle it back and forth. And it was big and scary. He stood up and grabbed the tape measure from his desk drawer and suction cupped the dildo to the top of his desk—because the thing had a suction cup on it, of course it did—to measure it. It was ten and a half inches long, a little over two inches wide, and about an inch in height. And it had foreskin. That moved back and forth. It had better not spit on him.

What the hell, Daddy?

_A Christmas miracle…give you what you wanted._   
_What do you want for Christmas?…Your cock._   
_If you’d been better behaved on Christmas Eve, maybe you would have gotten the real thing._

He raised an eyebrow to the dildo standing proudly on top of his desk. It was high quality.

_Spend twenty-five minutes with it and think about me._

He’d seen the make-your-own-dildo kits before. That was a thing that could happen, though probably not to this level of quality. It had foreskin. He could feel it the moment his cock and his brain made the connection together. That freak show in front of him was a replica of Daddy’s cock. He had never really been a size queen. Cock was cock, and all cock was good cock. This monstrosity, however. This thing was intimidating. There was no way that beast was going to fit inside him. Especially not for twenty-five minutes at a time. 

But Daddy had asked him to spend the time. Shit. Okay, Stiles. Just think about this for a minute. Maybe he could divide that time up, like use his hands on the dildo, maybe like go down on it or something. It would likely choke him to death, but if this was in fact a replica of the dick he was going to saddle himself to for the rest of his life, maybe it would be good to get the choking and spluttering out of the way on silicone instead of the real thing. And giving head was always easier to do while he was fingering himself, so he could, in theory, be nice and open and only have to spend a few minutes at most trying to feed that thing into his ass. He could do that. 

He should record it. He was willing to bet Daddy would love watching it, even if the man wasn’t ready to actually talk about sex yet. The man was always praising Stiles for his creative genius, right? He should totally record it.

He pulled the dildo off the desk. That suction cup came with quite a grip, apparently, because he had to use both hands and most of his upper body strength to get it off. He knelt on the floor at one corner of his bed and then stuck the dildo against the bed post at roughly a height to match his mouth. He could hear the power of that stick. He grabbed the laptop from his desk and opened it on his bed, pulling up the camera and positioning the computer so the camera could clearly see the dildo and the empty space in front of it. He’d have to adjust everything when it finally came time to shove his ass onto that thing, but he’d worry about that later. He grabbed a pillow from the head of his bed and threw it on the floor in front of the dildo, then took the lube from his drawer and stripped himself completely naked. 

He dropped the lube by the pillow, hit the button to start recording on his laptop, then dropped to his knees on the pillow and waved at the camera. Every part but his feet was visible to the camera. His heart hammered. He waved and smiled.

“Hi Daddy. I got your present. I wanted you to know that I followed your instructions, so I thought I’d record myself doing it and then give that to you. I hope you like it.”

He glanced at the dildo in front of his face and his nose twitched a bit as he figured out how he should do this. He’d never made a porno before. He was a talker during sex, though. Maybe he should use that.

He kept his eyes trained on the dildo. “It’s, uh, it’s big, Daddy. I’m pretty sure this is a life-size model of your cock, isn’t it?” He reached out and stroked two fingers along the side away from the camera. The silicone was smooth and slightly silky feeling, but still silicone. The material grabbed against the pads of his fingers. “I’m not going to lie, it’s kind of scary. I didn’t know they could actually get this big.” He grabbed the lube off the floor and held it up and closer to the camera. “It’s flavored lube, see? I tend to like to play before I give head or put out, and nobody likes skin catching against their dicks, so I always lube up before that, but I’m pretty damn into giving head, and unflavored lube makes me gag, so I always buy the flavored stuff—chocolate or vanilla when I can find it. You know I have a sweet tooth.” 

He squeezed some lube onto his fingers, then discarded the tube without recapping it and spread the lube to cover one of his hands. He wrapped a hand around the foreskin and the bit of head poking out, flexing his fingers just slightly and gently pushing his hand back. The foreskin flap moved with his hand, so he loosened his grip and kept pushing back. The foreskin smoothed against his skin before falling back into place. He slid his hand all the way to the base of the dildo. With lube, his hand slid against it well. “I can’t even get my hand all the way around it, Daddy.” He twisted his wrist and slid his hand back up to the tip, covering the other side as much as he could on his return trip. “It feels good against my hand, though. I like the weight of it, the way it lays against my palm as I move it around.”

He gently fingers the foreskin. It’s soft and delicate, and it moves with his finger. He slides a finger under the foreskin, remembering to be as gentle with it as he can since he’s treating this like a practice run. “I’ve never been with anyone with foreskin before.” He rubs a bit against the head, circling a finger around it and then two. “I don’t actually know what to do with it, how to make that feel good.” He batted his eyes and looked into the camera as coyly as he could. Given what he was seeing, he thought he did a pretty good job of coy. He pulled his fingers out and ran both of them around the base of the foreskin. “I’m hoping you’d be willing to be a patient daddy and teach your baby boy how to effectively work foreskin into foreplay. I’d sure love to learn from you.”

A quick glance at the timer he’d set on his phone showed that little hand job, or whatever it was, took about five minutes. He could give head for fifteen minutes straight. He knew that; he’d timed it before. It would be an interesting experiment to see how much of that he could impale his throat on. Especially given that this was what his daddy’s cock was going to be like. His cock, which had bowed out of the proceedings as soon as he’d hit the record button, twitched at the thought of blowing this dick when it was attached to the man he loved. Would Daddy hold still when Stiles got his mouth on him? Would Daddy’s cock twitch against his tongue? What kind of praise would spill from his daddy’s lips as cum rained down his throat? If he practiced enough on this dildo, maybe Daddy could hold him down and fuck his face, telling him while he did it what a good boy he was, how nobody could take Daddy like he could, how his body was made to be his daddy’s. God, that would be awesome. 

He wrapped his hand gently around the base of the dildo and flicked his tongue out, licking at the head. The slit was very defined, almost deep. He flicked his tongue again, aiming for that slit, letting his tongue settle into and against it before wriggling it just a bit and lapping up. He leaned forward more, wrapping his lips around the base of the foreskin. He could feel his own cock getting warmer, thudding a bit as it filled up more. He slid his tongue between the head and the foreskin, wriggling a bit and enjoying the dual sensations on his tongue. The foreskin was light and tickled a bit as it dragged against his tongue. The head was full and firm, a round, solid surface for his tongue to run against. 

His dick pulsed a bit. He reached down with his free hand and pumped it once before letting go of it, feeling it fill completely up so that it stood up completely. He knew his dick was pretty. It was long and lean, though not quite as long as the dildo he had his tongue against at the moment. He’d clocked himself in at a good nine inches at full chub, and he knew how to use every inch of it.

He pulled his mouth from the dildo and looked into the camera. His whole face looked lust-drunk, his cheeks flushed and his mouth slightly agape. “Look what just the thought of you does to me, Daddy. God, the idea that this dildo in front of me could be your dick revs my damn engine. A couple flicks of my tongue and I’m already completely hard for the thought of you. Fuck, I want to suck your cock.” He turned back to look at the dildo. “Want you inside my mouth, inside my ass, filling me with your fucking cum and marking me for everyone to know I’m fucking yours.”

He surged forward, closing his eyes and giving the dildo a gentle yank before swallowing as much of it as his mouth could take. The suction to the bed held. 

His mouth was nowhere near his hand at the base of the dildo, so he brought his other hand up and wrapped it in front of the first. He pulled his mouth back slightly to wrap his thumb properly against the silicone, then slotted his lips firmly against the skin on his hand before pulling his mouth back, flattening his tongue against the dildo as it dragged back. He knew Daddy couldn’t feel what he was doing, but this was a practice run. By the time he had actual skin against his tastebuds, he was determined to be able to swallow around that head.

He bobbed and ducked and licked and curled and lipped his way further down that dildo, occasionally opening his eyes and looking at his laptop screen as he did it. He was so hard he was starting to physically ache, but he knew he couldn’t take a hand away from this dildo to touch himself. He wanted to make it as good for Daddy as he could. He’d been a brat at Christmas, and Daddy was still nothing but fantastic to him. Daddy had told him something important about himself. Daddy had said he loved him. Daddy had given him his cock after he’d said that was what he’d wanted at Christmas. He wanted to show he could be Daddy’s Good Boy, too. His dick pulsed at the thought of being Daddy’s Good Boy. The head of the dildo bumped against his throat and he fought off the reflex to gag around it. He knew how good it felt when someone gagged around his cock, but he was trying to make this good for Daddy right then, and Daddy couldn’t feel his muscles contracting. He pulled off slightly and imagined Daddy petting his hair back, fingers big enough to belong on a body holding THIS dick stroking through his hair, a roughly whispered “good boy” filling his ears as dove back in, angling his head and feeling the tip slide further along the back of his throat. He relaxed his jaw as much as he could, knowing that would relax some of the muscles in his throat. He pulled all the way off the dildo and looked into the camera.

“Fucking love sucking cocks, Daddy. You have no idea.” His voice was raspy already, the sound scraping against his well fucked throat. “Love having something in my mouth, something to suck on and lick at while I open myself up.” He grabbed the lube back up and squeezed a fat dollop onto on index finger. “Love the feeling of being fucked on both ends, god.” He wrapped his lips back around the tip of the dildo, gently pushing the tip of his finger into himself, breaching himself just slightly before pulling his finger back out and squeezing more lube onto it. He pushed it back in, sucking more of the dildo into his mouth as his finger further breached. He licked and sucked and fucked his fingers into himself until he was four fingers deep and his lips bumped against the one hand around the base of the dildo, that firm silicone sliding down into his throat every time he thrust up into himself. His thighs shook. Sweat gathered at the base of his back, in the upper cleft of his ass. He moaned against the dildo in his mouth, his throat muscles constricting around the head as he moaned. He imagined a string of whispered curses from above him, that phantom hand curling around the back of his head and gripping there.

He thrust into himself one more time, hard, a whimper catching his throat along the shaft as it slid its way down again. He pulled his fingers out and wiped them on his carpet, then pulled off the dildo entirely, a string of spittle still connecting his lips to the head for a moment before it broke and swung down against his chin. The dildo bounced gently against the bed post. He glanced at his phone, and damn. He’d set a new record. The timer showed three minutes remaining, but he was hot and his balls were tight and he was so, so _open_. The sight of that long, wide dildo sent a different kind of shudder through him now. He smiled at the camera on the laptop. His whole face was flushed, his lips swollen and puffy. He could see the sweat beading on his forehead. That flush extended down his neck and into his chest, which was heaving with exertion at this point. His dick was long and flushed an almost angry purple against his stomach, swollen larger than he normally gets. His cock felt too tight, stretched thin enough it might break if he tugged on it at all. He wasn’t going to, though. He wasn’t going to touch himself this time. This was for Daddy, not for him. He knew Daddy would want him to get off, to chase his own pleasure, but Daddy had given Stiles his cock and told Stiles to think of him. He wanted to be Daddy’s Good Boy, and Good Boys should be able to come on Daddy’s cock alone. He knew his man would be able to bring him that way, so that’s how he was going to do this. He knelt back on his heels and swallowed once. 

“Okay, Daddy, this is going to be longer than twenty-five minutes of spending time with your gift and thinking about you, but you did say AT LEAST, and I just need to see this all the way through. Give me a minute, though, because I have to move some things around.” He smiled into the camera and then stood up. His bobbing dick was camera level. He laughed. “The things you do to me already, and we haven’t even met. Look at me. This is seriously bigger than I normally get.” He stood where he was and yanked roughly a few times on himself now that he was a bit calmer. “I can’t wait to see you, Daddy. I can’t wait until this is your hand around me, working me off.” He let go of himself and pulled the damn dildo off the bedpost with his whole body. He almost fell over, and the whole fucking bed shook, but it came off. He knelt on the floor again, backside toward the bedpost, and then guesstimated the exact positioning he’d need and stuck the dildo back onto the bedpost before standing back up and grabbing the computer.

“Okay, Daddy, you’re just going to have to deal with the jostling and the movement and the boring for a minute, because I don’t want to cut away. I want you to see what a good boy I was for you, how much I love your present. I just have to get the laptop set up at a better angle, so let’s just…”

He grabbed his office chair and rolled it over beside the bed, angling the laptop camera down until the screen was filled with the space he’d need. Then we stopped at the bed and shut the timer on his phone off, tossing it back on the bed. He squeezed lube directly onto the dildo, in dollops and lines and swirls. He grabbed his t-shirt from the puddle of clothes on the floor next to his desk, realizing at the last minute that he’d need to protect the carpet from that much lube. When he was on his hands and knees, knees resting on the pillow they’d been on before, he looked over at the camera and smiled. “Are you ready, Daddy? All comfortable? I hope you’re touching yourself as you’re watching by now. I want to fuck myself on this replica of your cock while imagining your hand around the real thing. I’m gonna pretend I’m your hand, Daddy. I’m gonna wrap myself around your cock.”

He inhaled deeply. He could do this. He was as open as he’d ever been. He was excited and loose. He wanted this. He was in control. He could go as slow as he needed. He backed his ass up slowly, opening the space available with one hand as he did it and babbling about how much he wanted this and how much he loved his daddy and how good his daddy was going to feel around him and above him and inside him. The head hit him the tiniest bit higher than it should have. He raised his hips until it lined with his opening, cold lube squishing against his pucker. He pushed back just a bit more, until he could feel the pressure of the head actually pressing against his hole. He circled his hips slightly, moving that pressure around just slightly without actually pushing it in at all. “Would you go slow, Daddy? I bet you’d go slow. I bet you’d tease me, wouldn’t you? I don’t normally like drawing things out—I was going to say that you have no idea just how much I love cock, but you probably do, don’t you? I think I love that about you, that my Daddy knows everything there is to know about me.” He pushed back just a little bit more, the very tip of the head breaching, but not penetrating the muscle at his opening. He gasped and rocked back forward, circling his hips again. “I think I’d like your teasing, though. You’d know what I like, what I could take when.” He rocked back again, allowing the tip to breach just a little bit more. It felt so good, just that little bit of slip and slide, the smaller part of this beast pushing past the muscle. He rocked forward and inhaled. “You’d know how long to finger me open, how slow to push in.”

This was it. He had to go deeper this time, and he didn’t have anyone to hold his hand, to push through it while he gritted his teeth. He inhaled deep and held it for a second or two. He rocked himself back harder than he had on his exhale. The pressure and the width punched his breath out of him, but he pushed back more, baring down slightly. The head breached him completely, something brushing back as the dildo sank deeper inside him. He shivered at the sensation and the sudden burst of pain. He smacked on hand against the floor. “So goddamn big, Daddy. FUCK. So—”

He rocked forward just slightly, feeling the catch of the head and that slight brushing—the fucking foreskin. Jesus Christ. He didn’t think he’d actually notice something like that. Fuck. He rocked back again, pushing more into him and groaning. “Fuck, Daddy, so good. So, fucking, Christ.” He rocked back and forth, pulling more in every time, breathing through the pain and the pressure. There was so much pressure. He pushed himself through it, taking more in. That skin brushed against a spot on that push. His entire body clenched. His breath caught in his throat. His vision whited out slightly.

He hissed in a breath and looked down and back to see what he could see. His dick had lost interest in the pain. His dick always lost interest when pain was involved, but his balls swung slightly with the movement. He could still see some of the shaft of that damn dildo. He’d found his prostate now. He could keep going. On the other hand, he’d gone well over his twenty-five minutes and he didn’t want to actually hurt himself. He rocked forward a bit, a completely different brushing sensation sliding over his prostate. He cried out and clenched around the width inside him, hanging his head slightly and hunching his shoulders. It changed the angle slightly, putting more pressure on that spot that added pink stars to the white in his vision. He smacked the floor with the palm of one hand and bit his lip, rearing back in response. It slid in further, feeling like it punched all the way through to another fucking area code. He cried out, arching from the pain and pulling almost entirely off his new favorite fuck toy. He wheezed in a breath as sweat dripped down his elbows. 

“Jesus, Daddy, need you to—” He rocked back, taking more in. “Need you to—” In and out and in and out. Back and forth and back and forth.

“Fuuuuuuuuck,” he breathed out. “Tell me I’m good, Daddy. Tell me what a good boy I am!”

He imagined those phantom hands from before steadying on his hips, holding him in his arch as that gigantic cock fucked further into him, slower and more drawn out than before. He took in a ragged breath as those phantom hands pushed him away, then pulled him in again, dragging and dragging and dragging against him until the sparks in his eyes sunk deep into his balls, drawing them up. 

He was hard again. He was so, so hard. His arms were shaking. His thighs were shaking. His balls smacked against those gigantic silicone facsimiles. He’d done it. All ten and a half inches were inside him. He took a moment to take inventory. A warmth started in his ass and rose up his back, a fever spreading over his body. He’d NEVER been so full, stuffed farther than he thought he could be. He rocked forward an inch or so and then back again. The sparks faded, but his hard-on didn’t flag. He rocked forward further, keeping the drag slow and the angle high. A whine crawled up his throat and out of his mouth. Back fully again. Forward more. Back fully. Forward more, until the pain and the pressure lessened and all that was left was that full feeling. He leaned forward on his forearms. The head escaped with a squelch and a loud pop. He could feel the clench of his ass around nothing, the deflated, empty feeling. His dick was a pain and a throb beneath him, nothing but pulsing and agony. He pushed back again, taking every inch of it till it was fully seated in him again. He looked at the laptop screen. He was ass-deep in silicone. He was visibly sweaty and shaky, and the flush he could feel on his face stretched down to his knees. His hair was damp and sticking out at odd angles. He looked completely and utterly fucked out. He offered the camera a shaky smile. “You ready, Daddy? We’re gonna pick up the pace. Your hand’s gonna move faster now. I’m gonna strip an orgasm out of you now, and I’m gonna be such a good boy for you. I’m gonna come on only your dick, because your dick is all I need, Daddy.” He inhaled, then pronounced “here we go” on his exhale.

He fucked himself back on the silicone dick in earnest. He slid fast and hard, back and forth and back and forth, picking up more speed as he hit that magic spot every time. He panted and grunted and shoved and yanked in and out, up and down. He clenched down as hard as he could, gritting his teeth and arching his back in and down as he went. His chest constricted. His brain twitched. His balls exploded. His dick thumped in time with his heart. 

He blacked out. 

He blinked and found himself lying stomach-down in a considerable pool of _stickytackygross_. He was still stuffed full. His legs were jelly. His breaths were shaky. He huffed out a half-laugh and reached out to stop the recording, which was still going. It was out of his reach, so he found the motivation to push himself up to his hands and knees and crawled over to his laptop. His ass stayed stuffed full, and every step forward rubbed and grabbed and created more white sparks at the edge of his vision. He reached the laptop and smirked into the camera. He was completely fucked out, and it showed. He’d ridden hard. “I hope you liked that, Daddy. I know I did. I’m gonna do it again soon, too. Gotta practice taking you, after all.” He winked into the camera. 

Then he turned around and wiggled his ass at the camera. The dildo stayed in his ass. “It’s still there. It fits so nicely, you know—stays so nicely inside me. I want to keep it up there forever, imagine you inside me forever.”

He turned back around and looked into the camera. “I’m going to stop this recording now, get cleaned up, and then save this to a USB drive and tape it to my door. I really hope that you stop by tonight so you can pick this stick up and watch it. I love you.”

He stopped the recording and did just that.

~~~

He managed to make it on time to his nine am class the next day by some miracle. It hurt to walk, it hurt to sit, it hurt to stand, it hurt to bend, and fuck the very notion of squatting, but he had his new Jeep parked in a parking spot on campus and was hovering in a seat when the prof walked in and kicked off his new school semester. He could have healed the burning and the edge of pain, but he’d already determined that he hadn’t seriously hurt himself, and that edge kept Daddy at the front of his mind, where he liked the man to be. 

The envelope holding his USB stick of filth was gone from his front door when he’d left this morning. He hasn’t stopped grinning from that revelation. That video was the single filthiest thing he’d ever done in his LIFE, and he’d had a junior senator blow him by a dumpster in a back alley of a gay bar and had made it back inside in time to catch the drag show. Tonight he was going to ride the beast on one of their wooden dining room chairs. He’d totally bring the chair into his room first, at least. He was thinking about using Brian’s chair. It’d be fun to watch the guy sit there on it and quietly eat dinner, knowing it had been covered in lube and his cum at one point. He was still trying to decide if he wanted to record it and share with certain older werewolf judges when his phone buzzed in his shirt pocket. He had a new text message. 

_Holy fucking HELL, Stiles._

He smirked and then glanced up toward the front of the room. Nobody was paying any attention to him.

**Did you like it? I take your instructions very seriously, you know, and it was a very nice just-because gift.**

He slid the phone into his backpack and paid attention to the rest of the lecture.

It was lunch time before he had a chance to check his phone again.

_I don’t think I’ve ever come that hard, dear boy. Ever._   
_I have watched this video twice now. I’m halfway through a third viewing. You are a little minx, pet._   
_You are a very good boy, by the way. The best boy I’ve ever seen. That mouth of yours is downright angelic. You take direction like nobody I’ve ever seen, and you suck cock you were made for it. You will always be my good boy, Stiles. Always._

His cheeks warmed at the last message. He was Daddy’s very good boy. Those words heated him up, settled his nerves, quieted the buzzing in his brain. Apparently he had a praise kink.

**I love you, Daddy.**

He did, too.

~~~

An envelope was taped to his door when he got home for the evening. His name was scrawled across it in real handwriting—capital and lower-case letters and everything. The paper in the envelope was yellow and lined and looked like it had been ripped out of a legal pad. Handwritten in all caps were the words _Filomena’s—this Friday—7 pm. Dress nicely and bring an open mind._

He had no idea what that meant.


	2. And Here They Were

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles started the day in business casual and Converse. He ended the day a shaking, quaking, confused mess. Really, though, should he have expected anything different?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear to the heavens, this was supposed to be an actual story with a plot and everything. It was going to be sweet and kind and all sorts of wonderful for dear Stiles. I was gonna do fluff. Honestly. Instead, these two took my ideas, nodded at how nice they seemed, and then chucked every single one of them out the window in favor of filth, so have 10k words of smut and enjoy them as much as they did.

“Filomena’s” turned out to be a fancy(er) Italian place in Georgetown. It wasn’t one of those pretentious dress-up, three-piece suit kind of places, which was a fantastic thing since he’d have to be in his date clothes all day on Friday because he had to swing by the shop to pick up the primers on sex magic that Ray had ordered for him after his second week of winter break. They had taken FOREVER to come in, and the three of them had cost him his remaining $150 store credit. Ray had actually offered to put a lecture together since Stiles had shown interest, but Stiles told him that wouldn’t be necessary. He always told his dad and Scott what he was studying magically when lectures and seminars and series took up his time, and he did not want to explain his reasoning behind a lecture on sex magic. He doubted Scott would believe that it would benefit the pack (which it probably totally would, but whatever, Scott), and he didn’t want to have that talk with his dad, the one in which sex magic necessitated sex, but no, Dad, he wasn’t having sex, and no, he still wasn’t talking about his pen pal, and was his dad having sex with Anna yet? That was the one. It wouldn’t be fun.

He ended up in a dark green long-sleeved button down and his black pair of clearance dress slacks that Friday. Sure, he wore his Cons around campus and to the shop, but he’d remembered to throw his dress shoes in the Jeep that Thursday night, so score one for him planning ahead! He pulled up to the restaurant at 6:45. He was going to schmutz with his hair and floss his teeth in the car before going in, but the place turned out to be all about the service-with-a-smile valet parking, so there went that idea. He at least looked in the mirror to make sure he didn’t obviously have a wacky bit of seasoning from this afternoon’s BBQ truck lunch experiment in his front teeth. It looked clear, so he got out of the car and handed the kid behind the valet podium his keys before heading in. The hostess had already greeted him when he remembered that his dress shoes were still in the backseat. 

Daddy won’t mind. He didn’t worry about it. He was scanning the crowd and telling the hostess he was here to meet someone when he saw Peter fucking Hale sitting alone at a table in the back corner. The Zombiewolf himself. What was he doing in DC?

Something tweaked in the back of his brain. Oh, no. An older guy, probably a werewolf. No, no, no. Familiar with criminals, lost family. Uh-uh, no way. Knows Stiles so very well. Willing to handle any future murders Stiles needs committed. ShitgoddamnfuckHELL.

He was here to have dinner with Zombiewolf.

Well, fuck.

He stood at the hostess station for a minute, biting his nails and trying to decide what to do. Was this some sort of long-con prank Peter was pulling? The fucker had lost out on a shit ton of money if it was. That wooden box didn’t energetically feel like a prank, either, but everything he’d seen, everything he’d learned? That didn’t seem much like Peter, either. Peter Hale had always been a pragmatist, a pessimist, and one of the snarkiest realists Stiles had ever met. If he hadn’t been a creepy sociopathic serial killer who refused to stay dead, Stiles could have appreciated that fact about him. His daddy was kind, caring, romantic, and encouraging. These two lists of traits were at odds with each other. 

There was also the small matter of that video that Peter Hale was now in possession of. Shitfuckdamn. Peter wasn’t the type to put something like that on the Internet, but he was exactly the type to use something like that for blackmail. Stiles wondered how much falling in love with letters was going to cost him now. He was still very much in love with the man from those letters. He just didn’t know if that man existed. 

Either way, Peter still had that video. He always thought porn would be the death of him. He had absolutely no choice when he took that video into consideration. He had to go have dinner with Peter Hale. He headed in that direction.

Peter was reading something on his phone. He continued reading as Stiles approached him. He didn’t look up when Stiles sat down in the chair opposite him. That wouldn’t do.

“Zombiewolf. What the _actual_ shit?”

Peter did look up at that. Daddy didn’t much care for curses used in slang situations. Peter shut the screen off before he set the phone on the table and grinned at Stiles. “I am actually surprised that you came over and sat down. You never cease to amaze me, Stiles. Would you like a glass of wine?”

Stiles shook his head. “Not much of a wine person. I will ask again, more clearly for the old people in the back: What the hell is this?”

Peter sat back and sighed. Stiles had always hated it when Peter sighed. It had usually meant that Stiles had missed something obvious. He always felt like he was failing school exams when he’d been stuck around Peter in Beacon Hills. The wolf had always been intelligent, which had always irked Stiles. 

“This is dinner, remember? I told you to dress nicely and bring an open mind. At least you followed the first instruction.”

He laughed and held his foot out for Peter to see. Peter chuckled. “That’s still dressed nicely for you, B—Stiles.”

Peter had almost called him baby. This man was the same one who wrote those letters, shared his thoughts and his dreams and his nightmares. Were they real? Stiles arched an eyebrow. “Hey, I’m here right now, aren’t I? I saw you and put two and two together, and I still came over. I’d say that’s pretty damn open-minded; wouldn’t you?” 

Peter raised an eyebrow back because all the Hales had eyebrow game and it just wasn’t fair.

“I suppose I would agree with you on that. Why are you here right now?”

He shrugged. _Because I have fallen desperately in love with a man I hadn’t thought was you. Because if there’s even the slightest chance that anything you wrote was true, I would still pledge my troth to you and spend the rest of my days happily climbing you like a tree. Because the man who could see that I was alone and hurting and feeling left out could have been my soulmate._ “Because I’m wondering just how much of it was a lie, I guess.” It wasn’t even remotely the truth. Peter was a wolf. He’d hear the lie in his heartbeat. Would Peter call him on it?

Peter smirked at him. “Exactly none of it. I never once lied to you while we exchanged letters, Stiles. I lied to you plenty in Beacon Hills, but you were incredibly underage and I was only in my right mind for a few years toward the end. Even in those first few months after we met, I knew that everything I told you in those letters was the truth. Alphas bite in new wolves with a bite to the side of the abdomen. You’ve seen it with Derek. You’ve seen it with Scott. Did you never wonder why I held your wrist when I offered you the bite all those years ago?”

That…wasn’t something he’d ever even consciously noticed, he didn’t think. “What’s the difference between a bite to the abdomen and a bite to the wrist?”

Peter’s smirk turned to a gentle smile. “You should ask Ray next time you see him. He can tell you.”

And that. That annoyed him about Peter Hale. How hard was it to answer a simple goddamn question? His daddy answered his questions all the time.

“I’m not talking to Ray right now. I’m talking to you. You know the answer. If I’d have asked you in a letter or a text, you’d have answered me. Also, why haven’t you answered any of my texts since Tuesday night?” He’d missed the contact. The envelope he’d taped to his front door with a reply to Daddy’s handwritten note had still been taped to his door that morning when he’d left for school. 

Peter shrugged. “I threw that phone away.”

Stiles could swear his heart stopped for a second. Peter had just _thrown away_ the only device Stiles could actually communicate with him over. Like it wasn’t a big deal. Like he didn’t need to talk to Stiles as much as Stiles needed to talk to him. Like he could just forget that they’d had this incredible thing for literal months now. Like it had never meant as much to Peter as it had to him. And that was the kicker, because it would be so, so easy to believe that this was true for the Peter Hale he’d known in high school, but the sensitive, loving man in those letters had felt maybe more than Stiles over the time they did their…thing. Whatever it was.

“You…threw the phone away. Because?”

Peter sighed again, but this sigh seemed heavy. He closed his eyes and leaned his elbows on the table, letting his head tip back to face the ceiling. “Because one way or another, tonight would bring the end of needing a burner phone to communicate with you. You would either show up and decide to completely forget that you knew me before, or you would walk out and that would be the end of that. I should have remembered that you always surprise me.”

Because he was here right now. He was sitting at the table and not letting Peter off the hook for all his crazy. He hadn’t turned around and walked out, even though he’d contemplated it, but he couldn’t just pretend that Peter hadn’t been a terrible, manipulative person for most of their years of acquaintance. That’s why he’d surprised Peter this time around. 

Good god, he _knew_ this man.

It was Stiles’s turn to morph his smirk into a gentle smile. “What was his name?”

Peter blinked, and then he blinked again before tilting his head at Stiles. “Who?”

He shook his head. Anyone else would have problems keeping up with that question. He expected more of D—Peter. He didn’t reply. He did keep quiet. It was killing his brain and the tips of his fingers, but he kept quiet.

Peter glanced around the dining area, his eyes seeming to wander idly. Then he said two words: “Alex” and “David.”

Peter had only talked about losing his son specifically. He didn’t know anyone else from “family” and “loved ones.” He waited some more, as patiently as he could. He looked at Peter expectantly, trying his hardest not to comment aloud. Some of the nervous energy he always felt at just NOT speaking shuffled itself down into one knee. He let it bounce. It was easier if he just let certain movements happen. He lifted a hand to his mouth to bite at a cuticle while he waited.

Peter reached out and grabbed the hand, bringing it down to the table and resting his hand over it. “David was my son. He was two years old when the fire took him. He was my heart and my soul. Talia had tried to force an arranged mating on me as soon as I graduated high school. She wasn’t entirely wrong to do so—the pack was a large pack, much less insular than our own, and would be a powerful ally for our small family pack. I just didn’t particularly…”

Stiles smirked. He knew this one, too. “Care for women?”

Peter huffed, but he looked amused. “That’s one way to put it. I bedded my ‘wife’ as often as I needed to in order to pup her, but Alex was where my affections, such as they were back then, really lay. He was only three years older than me. Can you imagine that? So close in age, so alike in many more ways. My wife didn’t like it. She’d known from day one that this was going to be a political mating, so she understood dalliances, but she was furious that I was “dallying” with another man.” Peter shrugged. “Her pack might be large, but they were too old-fashioned to keep up with Hale Pack.”

The waiter interrupted to take their drink order and then Peter continued.

“She gave me David, and it turned out she had never even wanted children. Can you imagine being forced to have children even though you hated them? We dissolved the contractual mating agreement just a few days before the fire. She gave me full and sole custody of David, who was two years old at the time. Alex loved that boy so much. He may have loved my son more than I did, though you’d be hard pressed to find anyone I could really say that about. The fire was such a travesty because we were gathered there, the entire family, including relations from Utah and Colorado, to celebrate the dissolution of one bond and the creation of another. My ex stayed on to watch my second mating ceremony, because she knew how happy I was and it would give her more time to enjoy herself before she had to head back to her pack and explain to them that her husband and contractual mate liked men more than she did and that David, who had been a healthy male wolf, was a Hale and would be staying with the Hales. 

“Alex and I hadn’t even gotten to the mating bite when the world turned to chaos and fire. We were holding the ceremony in the house, away from prying eyes, so well over fifty wolves were packed into a three story house for this celebration, and nobody could get out. Did you know the house had sub basements? Plural? Our tunnel system was massive. We had emergency exits all over the place, so we scattered, each of us in small groups heading to a different exit. Every single one of them had been blocked with that damn mountain ash. It took me much longer than I am willing to admit to discover how they’d gotten hold of that many pounds of mountain ash.” Peter’s face flinched for a moment, but he went on. “I took little Cora’s hand and Alex picked David up and we fled down a corridor off the third sub-basement that would take us to the edge of Hale land bordering the town, only to meet with the barrier everyone else was meeting elsewhere. We backed up, making it into the basement itself, which by that time was a raging inferno. When the house was alive and functioning, the basement was the game room. It was filled with flammable materials, and the fire danced and leaped and sucked air from the room faster than we did. I remembered a section of wall Derek had taken to messing with when we hung out down there together and led my little group to that section. The bricks there were loose because Derek had been a tiny little shit even then. So I broke and tore and bodily slammed into the brick wall until the bricks gave way, and the three of us conscious of what was actually happening around us tore the bricks out and dug through the dirt until we had an emergency exit. I scrabbled up to make sure the way was clear and found a space wide enough to lay against the ground and a solid ring of mountain ash, but nothing else. We got little Cora through first, as she was the daughter of my alpha and my niece. When she had joined me, the two of us laid on the ground and blew against the ash line with everything we had. It took a precious ten minutes of blowing air that was smoke heavy and ragged against that line, but it cleared enough to get people out. I could hear Alex screaming for anyone who could hear him that we had an exit. I don’t know how many more people gathered around him. He called up to me that he was going to pass my David to me, but he’d lost conscious so I’d have to meet him halfway.

“My hands brushed against my son one last time before a support beam gave way and fell directly onto Alex, crushing him in wood and hot steel and the flames of hell. Fire flared off the man I’d almost gotten to call my own, spreading to my unconscious son and then dancing to the rest of the room. It caught my left side, burning me deeply but not spreading. The two most important men in my life had been burned alive, and I couldn’t even join them properly that night.”

Stiles could hear the bitterness and disappointment in Peter’s voice. He knew that disappointment. He still sometimes felt that deep bitterness, the survivor’s guilt. He turned the hand underneath Peter’s palm up, lacing their fingers together. “Hey, don’t do that. You tried, Peter. God—” his voice cracked, and he had to take a moment to clear it before he could continue. “You got Cora out! Of everyone in that house, all those people desperately scrambling for exits, you MADE one. You worked hard on making one, and you made sure that another one of your alpha’s children survived to fight another day, and GOD, but she’s a fighter. The fact that she is still fighting somewhere today is on YOU, Zom—Peter. Sorry, old habits.”

Peter laughed, but Stiles could still hear the bitter undertone in it.

“Cora did get out, and I have her, but I couldn’t save my own child. I couldn’t save the man I adored. I couldn’t protect them. I was never able to provide for them, to keep them safe and loved, to watch David grow into a bright young boy. And my then ex wife died in the house. Most of them passed in sub basements not located on any plans or blueprints or in tunnels not officially mapped out. Your dad’s department only found what, eight people in the fire? Eight out of fifty-four. When my human mind returned to me, I dug through the charcoal and the rubble. I pulled forty-four sets of remains from the wreckage and buried them all. I buried the bones of Alex and David together. They were close in life; they should have each other in death.”

Stiles didn’t know what to say to that. Nobody had ever talked about the night of the fire from the inside of the house. Nobody had mentioned all the sub basements and tunnels. “Did Derek know that many people were in town?”

Peter just nodded.

No wonder Peter had always been more sarcastic and nasty to Derek than he had to others. Stiles nodded back.

“You shouldn’t have had to do that by yourself. You should have told Derek what you were doing. He would have helped.”

Peter offered him a smile. The corners of his mouth didn’t raise far, but it was a genuine smile. “And what would he have been like after witnessing that, Stiles? You knew him. You knew how much guilt already ate at him. If I had shown him where all the bodies were actually buried, do you think he ever would have recovered?"

"I think that decision shouldn't have been on you completely, Pete. Did _you_ ever recover?" Burying the charred remains of almost every member of your family didn't seem like something anyone could recover from. Even fictional heroes would bow under the weight of mourning so many people by themselves. It was no wonder Peter was so bitter and creepy even after his human side healed and came out to play.

Stiles licked at his lips and thought about where to go from there. Peter looked sad, and something about that weighed his skin down. Every part of him felt heavier at the thought of Peter Hale, fire still fresh for him, burying members of his family that Derek didn't even know about. How could Derek not know people were still down there? Peter said he knew that night was a big event. Did Derek think others escaped? Why didn't he and Laura run to those people, if he'd thought they'd survived? 

"You can never tell Derek, Stiles. You have to promise me you won't, like you listened to all my instructions before. I'll trust you if you promise."

The smiling, surprised--delighted?--Peter Hale was gone now. The sarcastic Peter Hale from Beacon Hills who never took anything seriously and judged people instead of being useful hadn't taken his place. This Peter looked forlorn. He looked like he was actively mourning. Stiles's heart lurched for him. He's seen glimpses of this side of the man he loved, the man who desperately needed to comfort and protect the people he loved because he's lost too much already.

"I promise, Peter. I won't say a word to anyone about the night of the fire. Not even Scott. Not even my dad. You have my word."

Peter looked into his eyes for the first time that evening, brushing his thumb against the skin of Stiles's hand. "Thank you."

And that was enough of that. This dinner was supposed to be romantic and happy and full of hope for the future. He needed some levity.

"So, then, I take it you're not a judge?"

Peter scoffed out a low chuckle. "Hardly."

"You told me you worked with criminals, and I'm willing to put my dad's life savings on the fact that you're not a cop, so lawyer, then? I could see you as a defense or corporate lawyer. You'd be kick ass doing it." Stiles smiled at him and gripped the hand in his a little tighter. 

Peter covered their interlocked hands with his other one. "Dear boy, if you really want to know what I do for a living these days, I will tell you, but make sure you actually want to know. I'm not a lawyer, but I do work with criminals every day."

This was going to be something he would have hated old Peter that much more for, then. Okay. He was a different person. The Peter Hale across from him was a different person. He was fairly certain all this emotion whirling around his center mass was love for Peter. "I want to know, Pete."

Peter withdrew his hands from Stiles and set them below the table, leaving Stiles with the immediate internal reaction of _not good give them back mine_. Definitely love for one Peter Hale, then. Okay. He stayed quiet, though, and waited for Peter to tell him.

"I'm what you might call a fixer by trade. When my pack was alive and whole, I was what packbound wolves called an enforcer or a left-hand. I very quietly worked behind the scenes to fix any situations that were not going well and couldn't be diplomatically handled, and I did whatever it took to get hose situations fixed with no regret or remorse because my pack came first. Intimidation, debt collection, wetwork, disposal, whatever was needed. I wasn't exactly a 'good' guy by normal standards even before the fire, but I'd always had a talent for it. After I'd actually completed all portions of my vendetta, which took well into the summer before the Hunt got us, I'd toyed around with joining another pack and resuming my duties there. I still have plenty of pack contacts, given my role as third in Talia's pack. 

"Ultimately I decided the money was better if I went freelance in general, and I didn't want to risk losing everything again. I've made quite a name for myself in the last couple of years, and I enjoy traveling, so it's been quite a lucrative endeavor."

He'd thought his guy was the type to travel a lot. Would work like that allow him all those luxury accommodations he knew Peter loved, all those fine tastes his daddy had? He thought back to Christmas.

"Could I come along next time?"

Peter tilted his head slightly as he looked at Stiles. Peter looked slightly confused.

"Next time you travel for work, I mean. Could I travel with you? DC is the only place I've been outside of Beacon Hills and its surrounding forests and beaches. It'd be nice to see new places."

He would love to climb a mountain or cross a desert or take a ship across the ocean. Sailing looked like fun.

Peter nodded, that delighted smile he'd started the night with settling on his face. "If you'd like to and it doesn't interfere with your studies, I would love to take you with me and show you the world, Stiles. If it's something you'd want to do with me. Otherwise, I'd be happy to contribute to a travel fund for you. It would be a way to further your education yet again, which I adore accepting the responsibility for."

Of course he would. Daddy was serious about both education AND pleasing Stiles. Daddy would offer him those choices in a heartbeat and mean every word he said, no strings attached. Peter still hadn't mentioned the video.

He wanted to say yes, to tell Peter he wanted to travel with HIM. He wanted to tell the wolf that he was 99.99% sure he was completely and totally gone on him, that he was pretty sure Peter was like his soul mate or something. But Peter hadn't mentioned the video. Peter had completely damning evidence that he could use to "fix" Stiles someday, and Stiles could still very clearly remember Peter from their Beacon Hills days.

He must have been giving off all kinds of anxiety-related signals because Peter frowned and pulled something from a pocket on his suit jacket, placing it on the table in front of Stiles. It was an SD card, and it wasn't marked in any way.

"What's this?"

"I made it for you. You can watch it now, if you'd like. It's compatible with your phone. Just plug your headphones into your phone first."

He pulled his phone and his headphones out of his pants pockets, but then hesitated. Had Peter made a backup of the video? Was this Peter reminding him that he now has the upper hand? If he watched this, would a demand for him to do something he didn't want to come next?

"Go on, Stiles. It won't bite you, I promise."

There was that whole psychic thing again. Now that he knew Daddy was Peter Hale, he believed even more that Daddy had to be at least a little psychic, even though he did get that jerk session in on Christmas Eve without Daddy knowing.

Peter must have caught the smirk on his face at the memory. "Seriously, Stiles, while I don't mind waiting and have cleared my calendar for the remainder of the evening, it would be nice if you at least started the damn thing. Ear buds in ears. SD card in phone. Let's go."

Peter's voice was soft and gentle as he gave Stiles those commands. Stiles didn't blink twice. He didn't think about it. He simply popped his ear buds in his ears and inserted the card. Was he Stockholmed? Had Peter successfully Stockholmed him into wanting to listen to the wolf? Was this what Stockholm syndrome looked like?

Only one file sat on the card's directory. Stiles opened it. A very naked Peter Hale sat on-screen in a wingback chair covered in what looked like plushy fabric. He looked comfortable and content. The smile he wore as he looked into the camera looked completely blissed out, the kind of goofy that Scott used to get over Allison. Stiles did, indeed, have a life-sized replica of Peter Hale's cock under his pillow at home. Shit, that thing was downright beautiful attached to a human(oid) body.

"Hey Baby Boy." Peter's voice still had that trademark low rumble, like he gargled with gravel every morning before starting his day, but it sounded so...gentle as he addressed the camera. As he addressed STILES. "I'm getting ready to watch that pretty little film you made me again, and I thought you'd probably like it if I returned the favor. Did you watch your little video before you sent it off to me? Every time I watch it, I swear I come a little closer to finding God, baby. You are so fucking pretty kneeling like that, choking yourself on high-grade silicone so you can learn to take me. I'm actually in awe of your natural submissive talents, and just thinking about taking your offer, about training you is all it takes to get me hard these days. You'd be such a good student. You're already Daddy's Very Good Boy. I'm not sure if you're even aware of some of the things you said out loud in that video, but I want all of it, too. I'd fill you so good, mark you thoroughly so nobody would ever have a doubt that you're MY little boy. I'd make it so good for you that you'd swear you'd never known pleasure until you had it from me." On screen, Peter's dick was filling and hardening. Stiles had very little doubt that Peter could--would give him everything he'd just promised.

"I've already watched your gift to me at least a dozen times, baby. I had to clean cum off my ceiling after the first couple of viewings. You were made to suck cock, darling boy, and I love imagining your lips wrapped around me, those cheeks hollowed out and that little tongue fluttering against me. Christ, it would be like stumbling through the gates of Heaven itself. Mmmmm."

On-screen Peter slid one hand up and down his shaft once and then stopped touching himself. "We're going to watch your little video together now, Pet, and I'm going to show you how much I approve, how very, very good you are."

He turned away from the camera, and Stiles may have pouted just a bit. He liked Daddy's attention on HIM. Daddy couldn't just ignore him to watch porn! And yeah, maybe this was a Stockholm thing. It had to be, right? A low chuckle rumbled across the table from him as Daddy picked up the remote and got things going. He could hear himself speak from the TV, which was large and angled in such a way that he could see the screen as well as his daddy on that plush chair, his dick free and jutting out at a forty-five degree angle from his lap. Stiles squirmed a bit in his chair at the sight.

"You're such a clever boy. I had no doubt you'd understand the significance of this present." His daddy watched him play with the toy on the big screen. He watched his daddy watching. He could hear himself babbling in the background, dirty thoughts of being owned and marked and covered in cum actually vocalized. His daddy gripped around the base of his dick as Stiles watched, talking to him over the background stream of filth. "Your mouth, baby, fuck. The way it switches from elegant arguments to intellectual comments to absolute FILTH." Daddy pumped at his cock a couple times, moving his hand slowly and firmly. "I want to kiss that mouth. I want to fuck that mouth. I want to own it, God. Stiles, the things you make me want again." The TV had gone relatively silent except for the sounds of slurping and popping. He watched the TV for a minute. He looked wrecked already, small and wanton and needy. Fuck. Now he was turning himself on.

And he'd always called PETER a narcissist.

Another guffaw raised up from the opposite side of the table, but on his phone his daddy was picking up the pace and making _sounds_, so he didn't look up. He noticed how Daddy stripped his own cock so he'd know how the man...Peter would like it. So he'd know how Peter would like it. 

They got to the point in the original video where Stiles had begun fucking himself on that dildo, and the Peter on his phone clamped his grip around himself further, using both hands when necessary, and moved in time with Stiles, muttered curses and broken sounds joining the Stiles on the TV. He praised Stiles the whole time, telling him what a good boy he was for Daddy and how sweet and beautiful he was and how clever he'd been to figure out how to take so much at both ends the very first time. He panted about the pertness of Stiles's ass and practically whined out how good Stiles was taking it, how perfectly he was made for his daddy.

The interest from his pants region grew exponentially from there. TV Stiles worked himself on the length of the beast, phone Peter stripped himself with a grip that would have broken other dicks in half, and Stiles grew harder and fatter, a solid flush steadily rising up his skin. By the time TV Stiles and phone Peter came--at the same damn time, God DAMN it, Zombiewolf--Stiles was flushed and uncomfortably hard and possibly panting just a bit.

The video ended, leaving him slightly dazed and trying to make connections in his brain at the same time as he forced himself to not die from sexual stimulation. Peter had taken him to a mostly nice restaurant. He was not going to come all over the table linens.

Peter hadn't given him back his video. Instead, Peter had made on of his own to share with Stiles.

He took the SD card out before sticking the phone back in his pocket. He held the card up. "This for me?" 

Peter finished chewing the food in his mouth. When had food arrived? When had they ordered? He couldn't remember seeing the waiter come back. A glass of amber ale sat on the table in front of him, the glass barely sweating and a foamy head still sitting on top of the beer in the glass. He took a gulp of it and stared at Peter, willing the man to speak, full mouth be damned.

Peter waved his fork at him without looking up. "It was made for you. That pretty much makes it yours."

Oh. Peter had recorded a sex video in response to his sex video. Peter had given him his own copy of said video. 

OH. He remembered a conversation he'd had with Daddy one week. He'd said out loud (figuratively, obviously) how much he hated always being dealt the lower hand. Everybody always had something over him, something they could use against him, and his general rule was to never trust anybody as far as he could throw them. Daddy had responded that he'd totally understood, that a bit of paranoia was a healthy thing.

_Oh._

Daddy had always insisted that he wanted to be a safe place for Stiles. Peter had recorded this video, which had just as many blackmail opportunities as the one Stiles had handed him, and then said Stiles could keep it.

Peter Hale had just purposely leveled the playing field between them. Peter still wanted to be his safe place.

Well, shit. He was just going to have to date the fuck out of this werewolf, then. There was nothing else to do about it.

Stiles nodded. "Got another copy of this?"

Peter looked up at that question, but his facial expression was still fairly placid. Placid for Peter, anyway. "I don't know whether to admit that the answer to that question is yes or not."

Stiles grinned. "Good." Then he snapped the SD card in half using the edge of the table and dropped both pieces into his beer. "It would be an absolute shame if I never got to watch that again."

The look on Peter's face changed from placid to HUNGRY in the time it took Stiles to look back up at the man. He smiled beatifically at Pe--his daddy. He was still aching and shaking in the pants region.

Peter pulled the seat between them closer to his and then patted it in a silent command. Stiles slid the plate of food in front of him over to that spot, then did his best to side jump from one seat to the other, because standing upright would be painful, and not the good kind of painful. Besides, there were children in the dining room.

Peter placed a hand on his knee and kissed his temple, then gestured to the plate in front of him and instructed him to eat. It was spaghetti and meatballs. He could do that. He twirled the pasta on his fork and Peter tutted at something, probably his twirling technique. That hand on his knee rubbed his thigh, though, so he kept enjoying his tomato sauce. That hand was not helping him calm down any at all.

He'd just gotten his first bite of meatball into his mouth when that hand unzipped his fly. He stopped chewing and glanced over at Peter, his eyes widening slightly. Peter was eating his own food very calmly. He noticed Stiles looking at him and waved his fork at Stiles's plate, a wordless command. Stiles finished chewing the meat in his mouth. That hand at his crotch snaked into the fly of his boxers and caught his dick in its grip. He reminded himself that chewed food needed to be swallowed.

Peter looked down at Stiles's place setting and rolled his eyes. "Dear boy, were you raised entirely without manners? That napkin belongs in your lap. Fix it."

It was a fucking napkin. Who actually gave a shit where it--

That hand around his dick pulled it through both flies.

Oh. OH.

He grabbed the napkin and unfolded it entirely before situating it over both his legs so that his pants wouldn't get messy, because they were apparently doing this. Peter Hale was going to give him a reward handjob in the main dining room of a two dollar-sign restaurant while they were eating dinner. 

Absolutely. Why not?

While his hands were still under the table, he wrapped one hand around Peter's and laced their fingers together, gripping to his satisfaction and rubbing Peter's hand over his length the way he liked it. Then he let go and brought both his hands back up to his plate on the table, spearing the rest of that first meatball with his fork and taking another bite.

That hand around his dick gripped and loosened, stroked and caressed. Fingertips danced across his head and tickled up his shaft. A thumb dragged across his slit.

Peter flagged their waiter down and ordered Stiles another beer. That hand under the table jerked twice up and down his length. He licked his lips and focused on his food to keep himself from groaning out an orgasm while their waiter was talking desserts with his daddy.

When the fuck had THIS become his life? He felt like he should be more outraged about this, but then that talented hand found and played with his overly taut balls and he couldn't find any fucks to give. This HAD to be Stockholm syndrome. He ate his spaghetti and ordered a slice of tiramisu like the Very Good Boy his daddy already knew he was. 

The waiter walked away to put in their drink and dessert order and Peter sat back in his chair and started telling Stiles about the current job he was working for this completely asinine client who really thought gathering intel was the way to go when the only way to truly deal with the woman's problem was a bit of wetwork and disposal.

That hand worked his cock, twisting and circling, fingers curling and rubbing. It didn't stop. 

Stiles cleared his throat and nodded and made noises like he was participating in the conversation. By the time he'd managed to actually place his fork down on his plate, Peter twisted his grip at the bottom of his head and tears sprang into his eyes. He physically bit down on his bottom lip to keep from crying out as his orgasm shuddered through him and then shot out of him. He could feel the napkin in his lap sag a bit between his legs, and he reminded himself to breathe and to blink his eyes.

He sagged back into his own chair and licked his lips again as Peter wiped both his hands on his own napkin (and they were cloth napkins, too, shit) before standing up and announcing he had to hit the head. He kissed at Stiles's temple and whispered a quick "clean yourself up, baby" and then he was off.

Stiles folded the napkin, which was thankfully Olive Garden-grade linen and therefore didn't allow much liquid to actually soak into it, as best he could and wiped at his still slightly weepy cock until it wouldn't make the inside of his boxers too tacky to tolerate before he could get home and shower. He tucked himself back inside his...everything and did his pants back up, but was at a loss about what to do with the cum napkin. It was completely soiled and obviously filled with a liquid of some sort. If he just held it in his lap until Peter came back so he could get a cum-napkin consultation, it was going to seep into his pants, and even on clearance he’d still paid twenty-five bucks for them! There was no way he was going to cum stain twenty-five dollar black dress slacks.

He decided to embrace the “fuck it” way of life and toss the napkin on his mostly empty plate. It looked as gross as he’d thought it would. The waiter was on his way with a tray of drinks. Probably all for them. His daddy liked to indulge him. He grabbed Peter’s mostly empty plate and piled it on top of his own mostly empty plate and the squishy cloth napkin, aaaaaaannnnnnndddddd that liquid that just sloshed to the raised edge of his plate and refused to merge with the tomato sauce was most definitely NOT butter. Gross. 

He wrinkled his nose and pushed the pile of plates back to Peter’s spot before trying to look mundane and innocuous. He pulled out his phone and pretended to be checking it while the waiter set the 600 million drinks out on their table and picked up what Stiles had decided to name the ceramic cum sandwich. 

He had a new text notification. From a DC number he didn’t recognize. He flicked the app open as the waiter piled the sandwich onto his now empty tray and carried it away.

_Will you stop bitching about me getting rid of a burner phone if you have this?_

He smiled, his whole body feeling loose and pliant after a good meal and some decent sex and a new contact number for Daddy…Peter…Daddy Peter? He grimaced. That sounded too weird to be covered even under the umbrella of Stockholm syndrome. Daddy it was. 

**I totally will if this is your actual, real cell number.**   
**Also, did you Stockholm me into loving you through pen pal letters and gifts? Is that a thing you can do?**

He grabbed his glass of beer and downed half of it in one go. It was another amber, and it wasn’t completely horrible. His phone buzzed.

_That would be a thing I could accomplish with months of keeping you chained up in my basement and a tiny bit of water torture and sleep deprivation. As it is, you just got to fall for my natural charm and my enormous cock before you actually had to realize who it was you fell for._

He finished his beer—his dad didn’t raise no lightweight. 

**I can’t decide whether or not to be worried about the fact that you seem to know what you would have to do to Stockholm someone successfully. Also, where the hell are you? Did you fall in or something?**

Their waiter came back with a ridiculously large plate of tiramisu and two spoons, like Stiles was going to be sharing his dessert or something. Stiles cocked an eyebrow and put one of the spoons back on the waiter’s tray, then watched as the waiter smirked and carried the extra spoon back to the kitchen. He’d just popped the first bite of dessert into his mouth and was indulging in a borderline obscene noise of happiness when a hand wrapped gently around the back of his neck and squeezed slightly.

He wrinkled his nose. Peter had better have washed his hands.

The hand let his neck go and then Peter slid into the seat next to him, scanned the table, and then took Stiles’s spoon from his hand and helped himself to Stiles’s dessert. Stiles may have squawked in outrage. He’d be concerned about the squawk, but he’d let the same noise out in much more inopportune places about much smaller things. That was HIS tiramisu!

Peter scoffed at him and then spoon fed him another bite, which was pretty awesome, really. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to enjoy it, allowing his noises of good-food joy out. He felt the spoon touch his lips again, so he accepted another bite. Warm lips brushed against his cheekbone and he opened his eyes. Peter was smirking at him.

“People are starting to stare, Stiles.”

They may have been, but that didn’t seem to stop Peter from feeding him another bite. He turned his whole body toward Peter. “Wanna give them something to stare at?” he whispered to the wolf he loved. 

Peter fed him another bite and hummed. “What did you have in mind?”

Stiles dove forward and pressed his lips to Peter’s. It seemed that for once he’d surprised the wolf, because Peter’s lips stayed slack enough that he could lick them open. He shared his last bite of dessert that way, making the exchange sloppy and very visually obvious. Peter recovered quickly, pulling Stiles closer and sealing their lips together in a tight press of heat. Peter’s tongue wrapped around his, twirling and curling and pushing its way into his mouth. Fuck, his wolf could kiss. Stiles decided to fight back, because an interaction with Peter was never an interaction with Peter unless Stiles fought back. Something metal clattered against something solid and decidedly not metal, and then Peter had one hand wrapped in Stiles’s hair and one hand pulling on Stiles’s ass. Stiles moaned into the kiss and gripped at Peter’s shoulders.

Peter pulled away from him, his hands not moving as his head pulled back. Stiles stared into blue eyes he’d looked at before, though he was pretty certain he’d never seen those eyes look as dazed as they appeared in that moment. He beamed, and before he’d even realized what was happening had already uttered the words “thank you, Daddy.”

Peter pulled him into a tight embrace right there, on their chairs at a table in a crowded dining room of a nice-ish restaurant. He wrapped his arms around his daddy, holding him just as close. A cheek nuzzled against his cheek, the side of his head, his jaw line. Peter was scent marking him, he realized. He nuzzled into the movement and then tilted his head to the other side, offering more real estate for his daddy to mark.

Peter did just that, then let him go and dropped a hundred dollar bill and a fifty dollar bill on the table and escorted him out of the restaurant. They hadn’t even finished all those unnecessary drinks. Peter handed another fifty over at the valet station and came back to Stiles, handing him his keys and walking him to his car. 

Peter led him to the passenger side of the Jeep, then bodily pressed against him until his back was against the door, nuzzling the other side of his face. “You are a menace, Stiles,” he growled into his ear. “I had a plan for how this evening was going to go, you know. It included a lot more of you throwing things, a bit of groveling on my part, and sending that video home with you so you felt we were even. Then I would take you out again when you were more settled about my identity and woo you properly, but instead what happened? You took all my carefully calculated plans and chucked them out the window in true, delightful Stiles fashion, and now you’ve maneuvered a public hand job and a quick jerk session in a fucking men’s room out of me and I have nothing ready to woo you with.”

Peter’s tongue licked at the corner of his jaw and he blinked slow. He was pretty sure Peter was wooing him pretty thoroughly at the moment. “I think you’re doing a great job, there, man. Keep up the good wor—” Did Peter just mention masturbating in the bathroom? Was that a thing that just happened? How’d he walk to the bathroom with a full-on boner? He’d had an exact replica of that erect dick in his ass. He was fairly certain that thing could be categorized as a weapon of mass destruction, and Peter could just casually walk through a restaurant with it rubbing all up on his shit? How was that possible? “Did you just tell me you wanked off in the bathroom of the restaurant?” He pulled his head away from that tongue and looked at Peter.

Peter arched an eyebrow, and Stiles thought about getting uppity about it. It was a valid thing! Did Peter really just expect him to glide by an information bomb like that? Daddy knew him better than that! He raised an eyebrow right back. The Hales didn’t hold the trademark on sarcastic eyebrows.

Peter rolled his eyes. “Everything I just said, and you pick that thread up to run with?”

He scoffed. “Hell-O! You just talked about dicks and touching and touching your dick, and you thought I wouldn’t grab that gleefully and parade it around? I swear, it’s like you don’t know me at all. I should be offended and not let you touch me for the rest of the night. I could do that, you know. _I_ am a classy lady!”

Peter stepped back and smirked at him. _Shit._ He dropped his hands to his sides, that smirk on his face not changing at all. “Are you, now?”

Damn it, damn it, damn it. He hadn’t actually MEANT it! His fucking mouth, man. “Yeeeeeessss?” He could feel the uncertainty fill his face. He knew his reply wasn’t supposed to be a question.

Peter laughed. Tilted his head back slightly and everything sort of laughed. Then he ducked forward momentarily and pressed a chaste kiss to Stiles’s lips before laughing again. “I believe that, baby. You probably are one hell of a classy lady, and I can’t wait to woo you enough for you to unfold your flower or what the fuck ever for me.” Peter winked. Stiles scowled at him. 

“I shall bid you goodnight, then, my lady. Drive safe. Text me when you get home.” Peter stepped back and turned around, actually starting the walk to his car, and what the everlasting fuck? 

“Peter, wait!”

Peter turned around and looked over his shoulder at him. Stiles had no idea what he was saying, but he didn’t want Peter to go home—at least, not without him. “I’m classy as hell, but I’m also a modern woman, you know. I get to decide when I want to put out, and maybe I want to put out tonight.”

Peter snorted and turned back around, continuing on with his apparent trek to his car. “Goodnight, dear. I’ll talk to you when you get home.”

That was their first date. Peter Hale gave him porn, got him off, didn’t let him return the favor, and then refused to take Stiles home and fuck the living shit out of him. Stiles couldn’t believe he was already looking forward to their second date so much.

~~~

He did call Peter when he got home that night. He actually FaceTimed his daddy, like the good boy he was, but not until he got home safe, sexiled Kyle from the bedroom the vamp should not have been in at this time of night by dragging Brian’s kitchen chair into their bedroom and waving the beast under Kyle’s nose with threats of doing it whether the guy left or not, lubing the hell out of his ass and working himself open, then impaling himself on the beast slowly until it was fully seated, riding the thing slowly until he could take it all in one fell swoop without hissing in pain. 

He ended up calling fifteen minutes later than Peter had expected, if the worried text he’d received after two full minutes of riding the beast was anything to go by.

He raised himself completely off the beast and hit the button to call his daddy before angling the phone so the camera had only a clear picture of the beast and his ass. He heard the call connect, and all Peter got out was a “what the—”

He dropped down onto the beast in one motion, bottoming it out completely in what had to be three seconds flat. It stung like a motherfucker, but he wasn’t the one who hissed out loud. 

He didn’t say anything, just rode the beast rough for a good five minutes and thanked the gym gods he’d focused so hard on his squat game the last year. The other end of the call was much more silent than he’d have liked, but he had a plan, damn it, and he was going to stick to it. He picked up the pace, almost jumping up and down on the damn thing and wondering why his dick wasn’t yet on board with his revenge. Sure, the sharp movements didn’t feel great, but PLANS, damn it!

“Stop right there.” Peter’s voice was soft, but the tone brooked absolutely no argument. Stiles froze mid rise, half of the beast still inside him. 

“You will go no further down than that point unless I tell you to, Baby Boy. Do you understand me?”

Stiles had never heard that tone before. It was definitely authoritative, but it was welcoming and warm at the same time. He didn’t move.

“Use your words, Baby Boy. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Daddy.” His answer came out much more whisper-like than he’d meant it to. He still couldn’t see Peter from the angle he was at, but Peter had told him to stop and hadn’t told him to move again. He waited.

“Very good, Baby. That was a wonderful way to answer Daddy with your words. I’m not sure how I ended up with such a clever boy, but I’m very happy I did. Now, before I tell you to move again, I want you to repeat after me: Red.”

Oh. Fuck. He’d read about this. Peter was instituting a a color safety system. Stiles had never done this before.

“Red.”

“Good, Baby Boy. Can you say it for me again?”

The beast was starting to feel tacky inside his ass without the movement keeping the lube warm.

“Red.”

“Excellent. I’m going to ask you to say that for me one more time, Baby.”

He just wanted to MOVE. He wanted to squirm and to wriggle and to fill himself back up and GOD, when did his plans for this phone call stop being HIS plans for this phone call?

“Red.”

“Such a good boy. So brilliant, so eager to follow instruction.”

He could feel the warmth in his chest as his daddy told him all the ways he was good and right. The words “brilliant” and “eager” flowed down his body and straight to his dick, pulsing in and waking things up down there. Fucking FINALLY.

“I want you to remember that word, Baby Boy; remember that color. From here on, any time you don’t feel comfortable doing something I tell you, any time you need to take a break, use that word. ‘No’ will not get you out of doing what I tell you to for the rest of this call. What’s your word?”

Christ, Daddy was about to instruct him on how to fuck himself on Daddy’s dick, and he was going to do it over FaceTime. And his cock was up to bat, ladies and gentlemen.

“Red.” 

“God, you’re my good fucking boy. Do you know that, Stiles? Do you know what a fucking amazingly good boy you are? Answer me before I let you move.” Daddy’s voice sounded like a growl. Daddy thought he was so good that Daddy was gonna wolf out a little bit. His head felt a little bit lighter and he had to physically stop himself from falling back onto the beast.

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

Daddy wanted him to use his words. He’d been told that once already. “Yes, I understand?” 

Daddy laughed lightly, sounding pleased. “Yes, you understand, what?” he prompted.

Duh. His cheeks flushed with heat. “Yes, I understand, Daddy.”

His daddy hummed. “There’s my good boy. If you start to feel too floaty, or my voice starts to sound further away, or if things start to head out of focus, I don’t care what’s going on, I need you to red me. Understand?”

That sounded like the opposite of something he’d want. All those things sounded like good things. He was pretty sure he wanted those things. “No, Daddy.”

Daddy sighed. He still couldn’t see him. 

“Baby, I will give you all those things another time, I promise, but Daddy isn’t there with you right now. Daddy can’t take care of his boy should things go a little bit further than I want to take them this time around…Technically I shouldn’t even be doing this much like this. Now tell Daddy, Baby Boy: When do you need to red on me?”

Ugh. The beast was starting to get uncomfortable, and his thighs were starting to shake just slightly. “I need to red right away if I feel floaty, if things start to look out of focus, or if your voice starts sounding further away, Daddy.”

“Good boy. Now stand up.”

Oh, thank god. He stood up. 

“Stretch your muscles a bit. Shake out your legs.”

He stretched up, then out. He shook out his arms and his hands, each of his legs. He rolled his head around a few times to work out the kinks in his neck.

“Very thorough, baby. Well done.”

He smiled at the compliment, then felt kind of dumb. He’d done a couple of stretches. He shouldn’t get so excited about a compliment on THAT. His dick liked it, though, offering up a little twitch in interest.

“Kneel in front of the camera, but keep looking at your bed.”

He knelt on his floor, spreading his legs slightly and keeping his gaze on the bed in front of him. “I want to see you, Daddy.” He let a bit of whine creep into his voice.

“None of that, now, Baby Boy. You were going to hurt yourself in front of your daddy. Does that sound like a boy who should get what he wants?”

His heart sank a little. Daddy was right. He’d called his daddy because he was being a brat about not getting his way. His daddy would never reward that with giving him what he asked. “No, Daddy, it doesn’t.”

“Don’t look so sad, sweet boy. You’re breaking Daddy’s heart with that face.”

That was about the last thing he wanted. He fucking loved this man so, so much. His daddy’s heart was amazing, and he couldn’t break it. He smiled, tried to show how much he loved his daddy on his face. “Sorry, Daddy.”

“That’s okay, good boy. There are things we can’t control sometimes, aren’t there? Straighten the angle of your feet, rest on the balls of your feet more. Sit back on your heels.”

He did as his daddy told him. It was more comfortable.

“Good. Now take one of your nipples in hand and pinch down on it gently. Roll it between your fingers, but don’t twist.”

He followed his daddy’s instruction, enjoying the slight weight and the pressure against his chest, the feel of the skin rolling between his fingers. He didn’t usually do much nipple play when he was getting himself off, but this felt nice.

“Excellent work. Now switch nipples and do the same thing.”

Daddy guided him through gentle touches building enough pressure that blowing cool air against the skin of his nipples left his ass clenching and his cock drooling precum, then Daddy moved him on to carding his fingers through his pubic hair and loosely fisting his dick, sliding his fist up and down, but barely touching skin. Daddy had him do that until his eyes crossed slightly and his abs contracted so much he almost doubled over. Then Daddy had him physically tickle his own balls with all the fingers of one hand. It was so much, all the sensation, all the light touch and the new movement. He was on that edge, and all it would take was one good touch to push him over. Daddy made him grab hold of the base of his shaft, and grip tighter than was comfortable until he’d backed away from that edge. Then he’d praised him for a good two minutes before instructing him to turn the chair with the beast on it so that it was facing the camera and to straddle the chair, but not touch the beast at all.

He complied, hovering with his ass open and needy until his daddy told him what to do next. 

“Check in with Daddy, Baby Boy. How do you feel? Do you need a minute?”

He felt…He felt jittery, but it was an eager sort of jittery. His heart jackrabbited in his chest. His skin felt tight around his muscles and tissues. He could feel the fine sheen of sweat covering his back and his chest, his neck and his forehead. The backs of his knees felt damp. “I feel really, really good Daddy. I’m good to continue.”

“Very good, brilliant boy. I could tell that you were really checking in with yourself, and you did an excellent job. I am so proud of you.”

His heart slowed down to a normal pace. His muscles relaxed a bit and smoothed out. The room got brighter. “Thank you, Daddy. I want to make you proud.”

“You really do make me proud, sweet boy. You make me proud and you make me so happy, Stiles.”

He forgot how to breathe for a minute, but then he took in a lungful of air and grinned. Daddy couldn’t see him, but he had no doubt Daddy knew how good he was making Stiles feel.

“Now breach yourself, Baby Boy. Only to the bottom of the head, no further. Do it now.”

He lowered himself onto the beast before he could even take another breath. The tip breached him easily, and he pulled himself to a stop just as he felt a tickle at his entrance. It had never tickled before. He burbled out a giggle.

“Did you like that, baby? Did you like responding to Daddy without even thinking about it? Answer me.”

Shit, he really, really fucking did. His body just responded to the sound of Daddy’s voice, to Daddy’s words. He reached for pleasure not for him, but to please this other person—his daddy. It was fucking amazing. It was so heady. It was strong and black and thick and—

“Red,” he whispered.

“Shhhhhhhhhhhhh” was the only sound through the phone for a couple of seconds. His body shook a bit. All three of those things Daddy said he couldn’t have this time had started to move in, and he’d said the word. He reached out for the back of the chair, holding himself as still as the shudders rolling through his body would allow.

“Do what you need to do, sweetheart. Sink down, stand up. Listen to your body. Focus on my voice if you have to.”

He sunk down fully and yanked on himself with one hand at the same time. A sharp, pointed orgasm ripped through him, and he threw back his head and howled at the force of it.

A heavy rap thudded against the other side of his bedroom voice.

“I’d like to open your door, sweet boy. It’s just me. Nobody else is around. Can I come in?”

Peter was there. What was Peter doing in his apartment?

He groaned his assent. Peter took care of him for the rest of the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of very, very un-negotiated kink. Please don't do that. Also, an initial BDSM session via video call with absolutely no planning at all whatsoever = probably not the greatest idea to have ever surfaced. Probably don't do that, either. Really, just don't try this at home in general, although if you do the handjobs in a restaurant bit, don't get caught. If you get caught, don't blame me. ;P


	3. Aftercare is Important, Too

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles wakes up feeling weird, and Peter is there to help him through it. They have an enlightening conversation

When he woke up the next morning, Stiles felt weird. Of course his ass hurt, but the more he focused, the more his everything hurt. Inhaling made his knees hurt. He hadn’t even been on his knees last night, had he? 

A body draped itself around him from behind, arms loosely around him and one leg thrown over his. The body was hard, but squishy and pliant against his skin. It was incredibly warm, too. He snuggled further into the warmth as a shiver fought its way through his body. He felt cold.

The world was hazy, like he’d just been shaken awake from a five-year nap and the cobwebs hadn’t quite cleared his mind. He looked to his nightstand for his phone, but could only see a half empty bottle of Gatorade and an empty Greek yogurt that Brian was gonna be all pissed about him apparently eating.

The arms around him tightened just a bit, flexing as their owner started waking up. 

Peter.

Peter Hale had showed up in his apartment last night, in his room. He’d been shaky and almost falling apart then, but he couldn’t really remember why. He remembered the start of something really good, and that he couldn’t have that, so he stopped it. He could remember Peter helping him off and cleaning him up, but after that things sort of fuzzed over. He remembered that Peter hadn’t seemed mad or sarcastic, only worried. He was pretty sure he’d never found out why Pete had been worried. He couldn’t be sure that he’d cared at the time. He could only remember thinking that Daddy was there, would take care of him. 

He wasn’t entirely sure he cared much past that thought this morning, either. Daddy was still there. Daddy would still make sure he was alright. He reached up and grabbed the arm around him, pulling it more tightly against his chest. The leg over his draped further in response, and he could just hear Pete’s low chuckle against his neck.

“How you doing this morning, baby?”

A shiver forced itself down the length of his body again, and the arm around him snaked down and pulled a second cover that he didn’t even own up and over the both of them before settling back where it belonged. 

“I’m cold this morning. And achy. I don’t like being achy.” And whiny. Apparently he was also whiny. He pouted a little bit over it, then decided he was too miserable to care. It felt like getting sick, and he hated getting sick. Being sick was bad, sure, but the getting sick was the worse, all headaches increasing and flushes and cold he couldn’t figure out the source of and sore everything and no apparent cause for it until BOOM, full-on sick. It was the worst.

The hand near his stomach flattened itself against his skin.

“You’re a goddamn magic user, Stiles. The whole point of these classes and workshops is that you can learn to heal yourself.”

And he was going to respond to that, he really was. His answer was going to be both brilliant AND scathing, but his head was starting to feel a bit floaty and he could finally relax his tired muscles, and sinking into a calmer headspace seemed more important just then. He tried to angle around to look at Peter, and he saw the black lines coursing up Peter’s arm. _You’re a goddamn magic user, Stiles._ Whatever. He smirked.

“Why heal myself when I have my very own werewolf narcotic to avail myself of? You’re better than any magic I could produce. Damn.” He let his head relax against the shoulder behind him.

“You took quite a fall last night, baby boy,” Peter murmured. He could feel Peter’s cheek nuzzling against his ear and the side of his head. “Had me worried.”

He leaned into the nuzzle. “I don’t remember falling. I remember the most intense orgasm I’ve ever had in my entire life, then I remember you being there. Here you are, still here.” His smirk turned into a genuine smile. “I think I like you here, Pete.”

Peter gave him another low chuckle. “I like me here too, Stiles. I’ve never seen anyone fall into sub drop quite as fast as you did, baby. We are definitely not doing that again until we’ve worked through more. I’m glad I grabbed my keys and took off when I realized just what the hell you thought you were doing. You did a very good job listening to me, though. You take direction like you were made to, and I am definitely over the moon about that, and you used your words when you had to. I’m very proud of you, Stiles.”

The hand on his stomach skimmed over to his ass and flattened there, one finger settling into the crevice at the very top of his cheeks. He hadn’t even taken notice of the pounding in his ass until it was suddenly gone. His body relaxed even further as Peter kept up his pain-drain thing. 

“Do you know how beautiful you are, Stiles?” Peter whispered into his ear. “You’ve filled out over the years, of course, but you’ve always been beautiful. Your skin has always reminded me of moonlight reflecting off a lake, those moles like constellations burning against it.” The hand on his ass loosened its hold so it could brush up and down his side, just enough pressure to not tickle his skin. “Your big brown eyes like molasses just tapped, that upturned nose just begging to be kissed.” 

The hand gripped his shoulder, simply holding onto him. He shut his eyes and listened to Peter’s words, the caring tone of his Daddy’s voice even in a whisper.

“And your lips, fuck, your lips. I could write Shakespearean sonnets about those lips of yours. You bite at your lower lip, you know, when you get nervous. It pinks up in the place your teeth were, plumps just that slightest bit more. I want to kiss it better every time I see it.”

A small groan may have slipped out on his next exhale. It wasn’t really his fault, not really. He just—he was laying naked in bed with Peter fucking Hale, who turned out to have been his wonderful, kind, generous Daddy and who had admittedly never been exactly hard on the eyes, and Peter was taking away his physical pain and whispering about how Stiles was actually not physically horrid to look at, and it was a lot, okay? A lot. 

“Shhhhh, little one. It’s okay. I’m right here.”

And he knew that. Obviously. If Peter hadn’t been right there, he’d still hurt, and his brain would still be all foggy, and he’d still know that he was the weird spazzy kid with arms too long and stilted motions. He wouldn’t be considering that his lips were actually kind of hot or that his skin could be described as something other than “albino vampire who didn’t get enough moonlight.” 

He turned around, because the hand on his shoulder wasn’t holding him in place, it was just holding onto him. Peter smiled at him, and he’d never seen the wolf’s face look so soft. His eyes crinkled just softly around the outer corners. He had laugh lines around his mouth, and deep dimples low on his cheeks. Even his eyebrow game was completely relaxed in that moment. Stiles leaned in to kiss him, and Peter returned it with a soft, chaste kiss on the lips. Stiles licked to deepen it, but Peter pulled back, a smirk settling across his face and amusement in his eyes.

“None of that, baby. That’s not what today’s about.”

He leaned in and planted a kiss to Stiles’s forehead before twisting and rearranging them so that Peter was leaned against the pillows and the headboard and his back was resting against Peter’s chest. He sighed and snuggled back. Today was apparently about cuddles. He did enjoy a good cuddlefest, and it was Saturday, which meant that he could laze in bed all day. With Peter. Who was his sugar daddy. Whom he apparently loved. He wondered if Scott would kick him out of the pack on principle. He wondered if Dad would try to shoot Peter with the wolfsbane bullets he’d gotten him before he’d left for school. 

He took a moment to adjust the arms around him more to his liking and feel bad about basically sexiling Kyle from the room again. This time, he was keeping the vamp from his own bed during the day. He twitched his nose and sniffed. Behind him, Peter sighed.

“Whatever it is racing through your mind, Stiles, that’s not what today’s about either.”

He tossed his hands into the air and let them flail down wherever they landed. “Dude, my roommate is a vampire, and I desperately want this cuddlefest that you are so generously offering, but also, he is a vampire and I am sexiling him from his own bed during the DAY and he’s a really nice guy and that was not the agreement we came up with at the beginning of last semester and—”

Peter drew his arms back and circled his hands around his upper arms. “Enough, little one. Kyle will be fine. He’s sleeping on the couch in the living room right now, if you can call his rest ‘sleep.’ He doesn’t seem to care one bit. Please relax, baby. THAT’s what today is about.”

Okay, he got that. He did. Yay relaxing and just being together and cuddlefests and apparently this was a thing that was happening between them, they were really a thing, and seriously, yay that, but this was just not fair to Kyle. The vamp had taken time out of his crazy-busy Medieval English Lit/Advertising double major to teach him the basics of blood magic, and now he had to sleep on a lumpy couch, probably crushing two bags worth of Cheetos while he did it, because Stiles was getting his cuddle on with his sugar daddy? Kyle deserved better than—

Peter sighed, drawing his attention from his racing thoughts.

“But Kyle!” And yes, he might have whined again, but he never really denied being a brat. 

Peter kissed the side of his head. “How relaxed would you actually manage to be at my place, baby? Would you relax for Daddy even in the den of the big, bad wolf?”

He snorted. Peter was not the big, bad wolf. Peter had never been the big, bad wolf. He’d been the crazy, murderous wolf, sure. He’d been the snarky, useless wolf several times, but he’d never been the big, bad wolf. That had always been Derek’s title. Derek had always reveled in the idea of himself in that role, and Stiles could roll with that for his friend. 

“Would you eat me if I wandered into your den?”

Peter laughed and nuzzled him. “Not today. Can you move?”

That was a dumb question. Peter was smarter than that. They’d run from terrible things together. They’d actually worked on getting out of another realm entirely together. _Could he move._ Jesus.

He rolled to the edge of the bed, and then his legs wouldn’t hold his weight and he fell onto the floor before he squawked, “Nope. Apparently not.”

He could hear Peter laughing from the bed. The mattress shook with the force of it. He’d been wrong. There’s no love there. Stupid bastard.

“Peter, why do my legs hate me right now?”

Peter was laughing so hard little howls were escaping him. The idiot was howling, and wasn’t that just the awkward cherry on this embarrassing shit sandwich. He was on his bedroom floor, completely naked and flailing slightly while actually WORRYING about another being on this planet, and his sugar daddy the goddamned Zombiewolf was fucking laughing at him. Fuck everything.

“So much for today being about relaxing,” he muttered.

Peter peered at him over the edge of the bed, an amused smile still on his face. “Oh, baby. Oh, baby, no. No, I’m sorry. It’s just, it’s just absolutely hilarious watching you fall off the fucking bed like that. I just—I’m sorry. Here.” Peter stood up and then pulled him upright with an arm around his waist. “There’s a reason I asked that question, you know.”

Ugh. It was apparently exam day in Beacon Hills all over again, and he’d forgotten to study. Just like old times. Fuck Peter Hale. He let out a noise of absolute disgust. “Why the fuck wouldn’t I be able to stand, Peter? I feel fine! I feel better than fine! I am relaxed, I am happy, I am—”

“If this is you relaxed and happy, Stiles, I think we need to revisit your definition of those words. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Stiles spluttered. He actually physically, orally spluttered. Peter Hale just quoted _The Princess Bride_ at him. In context. Peter Hale was a closet nerd. He loved this man SO. MUCH. Seriously. How had he made it this long without Peter Hale in his life? The man was fucking ADORABLE. Seriously. That face. Those eyes. Those fingers. That hair. What even WAS that hair? Christ! It was short and fuzzy and really, really cute. His daddy was so cute. He reached up and waved a hand through the longer hair on the top of Peter’s head. Peter grabbed his arm, and he found himself back on the bed. 

“Alright, sweetheart, let’s get some clothes on you, huh?”

Then Peter was not touching him, and he needed his daddy to touch him. He scrubbed at the tears that were definitely NOT in his eyes. Peter had laughed at him. Again. Like they were back in Beacon Hills and the man hadn’t bought him a fucking CAR just because he’d thought it would make Stiles happy. Whatever. It was fine.

The softest pair of sweats on the planet slid up his legs. He knew they were the softest pair of sweats on the planet because he’d been loudly proclaiming their glory for two years now. They were his favorite pair of pants possibly ever. He sighed and lifted his hips so they’d finish sliding on, and THERE were the hands he’d been looking for. 

Peter sat him upright on the bed, and he let him. 

“Lift your arms for me, baby.”

He did it, but he sighed loudly to let Peter know that he didn’t like it. It was so much movement. It was always so much movement, and he was tired. He was tired of moving. He was tired of running. He was tired of…He was tired. Always tired.

The soft pull of thick fleece glided over his head and arms, and he closed his eyes as the fleece slid down over his face. His dad’s Navy hoodie. It was three sizes too large for him, and it made him think of hot chocolate with double the marshmallows and campfires and hugs from his mom. The not-tears did not make an appearance again. No, sir. This was fine. Everything was fine. He could take a nap and be all set to go again by nightfall.

A hand rested against his cheek, and he opened his eyes, taking in Peter’s worried face. His eyes scanned Stiles’s face, and Stiles wondered what they were looking for. 

“Oh, baby.” Peter’s voice was soft. “It’s been hours. What can I do?” 

He leaned forward and pulled himself against his daddy. “I’m so tired, Pete.”

“Okay,” Peter breathed against his ear. “Okay.”

He closed his eyes and let his daddy move him and position him, feeling his fuzzy R2-D2 slippers slide onto his feet before his wolf picked him up around the shoulders and under his knees and bridal carried him for a few minutes. He heard Kyle’s “I’m not awake enough for this shit” grunt, and then he heard Peter tell Kyle that they were heading out for the evening and that Stiles would be home before his classes on Monday, and then he was being bridal carried some more, his head resting comfortably against a chest that was pretty much made to be a pillow for him. He heard the ding and the whoosh of the elevator, and then the air around them got cooler. He shivered in closer to his humanoid blast furnace in an effort to get warm again. 

He opened his eyes to something tightening around his waist and discovered that something was a seatbelt. Pete was tucking a soft flannel lined blanket around him, then the car door closed and he closed his eyes again. Peter had him, and Daddy would never let anything hurt him. It was okay to close his eyes.

The next time he opened his eyes, he was in the largest bathroom he’d ever physically seen. There was a gigantic tub below a window the width of the wall. Next to the tub, along the same window wall, was one of those half-walled walk-in rain shower things that you only ever actually saw in those “exotic house” shows featuring cabins in the Alps that only multi-billionaires could afford. It had two sinks, a floor-to-ceiling cabinet between the sinks and the tub, one of those little half-wall cubicles to section off the toilet, and a motherfucking love seat. A LOVE SEAT. In the bathroom. The wall with the love seat—Jesus Christ, a love seat in the bathroom—held two closed doors, and the other wall held a two-way fireplace that actually held a roaring fire and a door that led to another room that Stiles couldn’t actually see.

Water was filling the tub, and the whole room smelled like jasmine and lilac. Peter actually set him on the love seat, and he realized that he was back to being naked. He was back to being naked, and the love seat was soft and plush and in the fucking bathroom. He sank back into the micro suede surrounding him and asked Peter why there was a love seat in this bathroom.

Peter smiled at him and asked where he usually sat in the bathroom to take off his clothes or put on his shoes, like that was any kind of actual answer. Fucking Creeperwolf, couldn’t answer a question. He chuckled at the not answer, and Peter turned toward the tub and tested the water. The damned love seat was comfortable. He couldn’t help but think that bathroom love seats shouldn’t be that comfortable. The view was nice—it looked out toward the Capitol building, and the city kind of looked shiny in the high afternoon sun—and wondered how often Peter sat on the love seat in this bathroom and admired the view.

Peter walked back over to him and put a hand on his cheek again. He nuzzled against that hand. It turned out it was a gesture he really, really liked when Pete did it.

“It’s bath time, sweet boy. How do you feel about me joining you? I will respect your wishes, but I don’t want to leave you alone very long right now, so I’d very much like to join you.”

He nodded. He hadn’t had a bath in a long time. 

Peter kissed his forehead and then stripped his own clothes off. He left them in a clothes puddle on the floor, which seemed incongruous to Stiles. Peter was class and elegance and organization and planning. Stiles was clothes puddles on the floor. He arched an eyebrow and looked pointedly at the puddle and then at Peter, but all Peter did was pick him up again and carry him to the tub. 

It was filled with bubbles and the smell of lilac. There were SO many bubbles. The tub was already 3/4 full. 

“Is it okay if I set you down in the water?” 

He looked up at Peter from his position against the man’s chest. Peter was smiling at him, and he felt really pleased that the smile wasn’t sarcastic, sardonic, or murdery in any way. It was just a nice smile, and it was aimed at him. Peter made no move at all while Stiles took the time to look at his face. He just seemed to be waiting, that same genuine smile staying on his face. He returned the smile, but he could feel his smile not widening as much as Peter’s. In his defense, the only time he felt legitimate glee these days usually involved new feats of magic or successfully ending the baddie of the week.

“Of course you can set me in the water, Daddy. I kind of figured that was the plan.”

“It is the plan, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get final say in everything, love.”

Of all the people he’d ever packed with, ever run with, he couldn’t believe it was Peter “I’ve returned from the dead and I’ve found all of you lacking” Hale telling him that his word was enough for people to act on. It felt…He had to check in to see how it felt.

His heartbeat had slowed down. It hadn’t been particularly fast to begin with, but it had definitely slowed. When he bent his wrists and wriggled his toes, his body didn’t feel so sluggish responding to his commands. Thoughts and ideas slowed in his head, finding that pace that he could achieve with the help of western chemistry and meditational energy work. It felt nice. It felt like he was trusted. It felt right to trust back. It felt comfortable and safe, really. If this wolf was willing to wait till he’d had his say to act on anything, was willing to follow his plan in something as simple as how to get into a bathtub, this wolf would probably try to follow his plan in battle, and that. That was a rush, really. A weight settled throughout his muscular system, like he’d been locked back in his body.

He tested his theory: “Daddy, can I ask you to do something?”

Peter was still standing in the same place he was, holding him and looking at him the same way. “Of course, baby boy. You can ask me anything.”

“Will you carry me into the tub and sit behind me so I can lay against you instead of just setting me in the water?”

Peter hummed. He watched while the smile on his wolf’s face widened even more. “What an excellent question, sweet boy. It would make it easier to situate us both so we have longer to enjoy the bath, wouldn’t it?”

He nodded. His stomach felt warmer. “It would.”

“Let’s do that, then.”

Pete did, in fact, carry him into the tub and slowly lower both of them into the water. He asked Stiles’s permission to wash him, and didn’t actually make a move until Stiles said that sounded good. It sounded better than good, really. The bubbles tickled at his skin and the water was hot enough to sink into his bones, but not hot enough to leave his skin feeling burned or raw. He was laid against Daddy’s chest. Daddy was holding him up. He’d felt really weird all day, and he couldn’t have been fun to be around, but his daddy was still holding him up. No, Peter was still holding him up. Peter hadn’t left. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so languid, warm and utterly comfortable. If Pete was offering to do all the work so he could not move some more, he had no problem letting the wolf. 

The cloth against his skin was soft, a gentle brush and glide rather than the typical scrape and rub of his washcloths at home as he hurried through the shower. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, he was back on that ridiculous love seat, a much drier, fluffier towel dabbing and brushing against his legs.

“This love seat is probably a bacterial infection waiting to happen, you know,” he pointed out to the man painstakingly drying him off. The towel moved up over his knees and thighs.

Peter hummed. “The fabric is water resistant. It’s cleaned regularly. No infection here.” The towel moved up further, but paused before drying off his dangly bits. “I’d like to dry you off completely, baby. Would you be okay with me touching you with this towel?”

He was clean and comfortable and almost well-rested and more relaxed than he’d been since probably before high school. He kind of wanted Peter touching him without the towel. He kind of wanted Peter, just in general. He wondered what it would be like between the two of them outside of Peter being Daddy now. Maybe he’d just always be Daddy, but Stiles could still remember what he’d been like before all this. He still remembered how good it’d felt to light that asshole up, because it was honestly what was needed. He knew that asshole Peter was still in there somewhere. That level of douche never went away entirely.

He nodded. “You can touch me. Blanket statement for this entire care session or whatever it is.”

The towel pulled away a bit. Peter stared at him, a slight scowl on his face. “_This_ is me drying you off. It isn’t a session of any kind, Stiles. If you’d like to talk about scening for real, we can talk and plan, but this is me taking care of you and you letting someone take care of you, for once. I honestly enjoy taking care of you. It’s been a long time since somebody’s let me do that. You deserve to be taken care of, and I’ve seen the way nobody else does that for you. That’s what this is. This is me honestly taking care of you because it’s what both of us need in our regular, everyday lives. This is me hoping that you’ll let me continue to do it because this? Today? It’s not about sex or kink or lifestyle. It’s about being close to another being, providing for someone I’ve come to care about quite a bit in ways that have nothing to do with my bank account or financial situation.”

That was…a lot to unpack. The towel rested against his skin again, drying softly and not once teasing. It didn’t elicit any sexual response from his body, either—probably because Pete had just given him a lot to think about. _It’s not about sex or kink or lifestyle._ From day one, back when Peter had been just Stiles’s “stalker,” he’d talked about how much he loved providing for others. The gifts had never been of a sexual nature until Stiles had pushed it at Christmas. He wanted to argue the “lifestyle” part of it, because Peter seemed to naturally fall into that daddy role and Stiles had immediately sort of accepted it and let himself be Daddy’s Baby Boy. He’d done some reading over the past few months, okay? Research was sort of his thing. This thing they’d built, it was definitely a lifestyle thing. It was a lifestyle thing he completely embraced, thinking of it as more of just a fact of life than a kink, even. It was more than just a dom/sub thing, although last night certainly showed that could be there, too. Last night showed that he probably wanted that there, too. 

The towel moved up to his abs.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Pete. I just…I meant that you can touch me. I meant that I want you to touch me, and not just in the ‘you turn me on so much, baby’ way, I think. I don’t know what I mean.” He scowled at the wall across from him while Peter continued drying him off. “As much as I talk, you’d think I’d be better at words, wouldn’t you?”

Peter chuckled. “You are better at words. You are better at words than anyone I know today. Sometimes I wonder if you have the ability of forethought, though. Your tactics and strategies when it comes to dealing with mayhem are incredible, but I worry about you outside of chaos and battle.”

Peter was probably right. He sighed and sat back further so Pete could reach more of his skin with the towel. “I don’t know. You’re probably right, I just. It’s hard, you know? To trust people. Friends and family, they all leave you eventually. They all let you down. Humans are just, we’re like crows surrounded by shiny things, you know? We see the shinies and we NEED the shinies and then we pick up the shinies and we treasure them as we go, but then we see MORE shinies, and eventually there are too many shinies for us to successfully carry, and we have to juggle them around and some get pushed back and others get dropped entirely. I just don’t want to be that background shiny anymore, right? I mean, I don’t think I’m the background shiny on purpose, or anything, but, but, but…”

He sighed again. He knew what he was trying to say: Dad had work, a whole county to take care of, and Stiles had shown long ago that he could take care of himself. Scott was always busy since he’d gotten bitten, new responsibilities at school, new people who recognized and liked him, new girls showing interest, a pack to run, territory to hold, and Stiles had shown long ago that he would always support his best friend. Lydia had…Lydia had a life without him and a grudge to hold, and he couldn’t blame her for that. She had every right to be furious after he’d told her all about his ten year plan to woo her and then told her they should just be friends. He couldn’t hold that anger against her. Derek had left him behind in favor of Derek’s sanity, which he couldn’t be mad about. Derek would have ended up a drooling puddle in a corner somewhere if he’d stayed. Beacon Hills was toxic for him, and while Stiles wished he’d have attempted to stay in touch more, he was happy that his friend had gotten away and focused on fixing himself.

He didn’t know how to say all that to anyone, though. The truth was that nobody had taken care of him in a long time, and he couldn’t trust people to start doing it now. If someone picked him up as a new shiny and he let them, he’d just become a background shiny again at some point, tired and worn down and wondering where everyone had gone again. He was tired of wondering where everyone had gone all of a sudden. 

“What are we, Pete? Here, now, what are we? I don’t want to be a new shiny.”

Peter toweled off his hair and rubbed behind his ears, quiet for possibly an entire minute before he answered: “We are whatever we want to be, I think. You were a new shiny when you were sixteen, Stiles. And I picked you up and I played with you for a while, trying to figure out where you fit with the few other shinies I allowed myself, if you’ll let me continue your metaphor. The other shinies in my pile dimmed over time, like they usually do for me—I’m a bit of a narcissist, if nobody’s yet told you that—”

Stiles snorted.

“But you, you just shone more brightly as time passed. Just when I thought I had a part of your puzzle figured out, you’d change the situation completely. I’d think to myself, _THIS is how Stiles is going to react to that inane suggestion_, and you’d react in an entirely different way, leaving me grasping to figure out what just happened. I’d try to plan ahead, thinking I knew what plan of action you were going to suggest for whatever danger we were facing that week, and you’d do a complete 180, and somehow that 180 made infinitely more sense than the plan I’d expected. At every turn, you showed wit and loyalty and bravery in the face of absolutely STUPID situations, and by the time we found ourselves caught together in the Hunt’s little pocket realm, I’m afraid that I’d completely fallen in love with you. I don’t know if you want to hear that or not, but there it is. You were eighteen and trapped in a nightmare situation, and you were still thinking of absolutely everybody, myself included, first. Your reactions in that place, to those fae, drove home that you had exactly none of the nice things you deserved. You’ve grown into a great fighter, Stiles, a hell of a general with a fantastic instinct and the soul of a warrior, but you have no poetry in your life, and I’m so in love with you that I want you to have poetry. You should be surrounded by things as beautiful as you are, baby boy. You should expect someone, somewhere, to take care of you. You should never worry about whether people will have your back when you need them to.”

The towel was gone, and all of him was dry except for his eyes. He didn’t know where in Peter’s little speech he’d started to cry, but he could feel the tears running down his face, fat droplets tracking down his cheeks. For someone who claimed not to be able to figure him out, Peter seemed to get what he had and what he didn’t. Nobody had ever told him he could have something like that, though, and every time he’d ever gotten close to actually wanting it, that sort of security had been ripped away from him. He didn’t know what to do with it when something like that was freely offered to him. He didn’t know how to trust that.

Peter took both his hands in his. “So you tell me what we are, Stiles. We can be anything you want. You want us to be friends? We’ll be friends. I’m still going to spoil you rotten, because I have the means and the desire to do that, but I’ll do it as your friend. You want more? I am ready to give you whatever you want. I am ready to tell you that I love you, that this fact won’t change, and that I will always have your back, no matter what happens between us, so you lead the way. We will do as much, we will wait as long as you need. I am very serious when I say that you are in control here, sweet boy. You have always been in control. I am very serious when I say that I am yours.”

This was one of those moments he really, really wished he’d accepted Peter’s offer and took the bite. He couldn’t hear a lie, couldn’t smell emotions, and the things Peter was saying had always sounded like lies to him, because he’d watched other people say the same things and act on entirely different premises. People would always let you down. It was a fact of life, and here was this fucking werewolf kneeling in front of him and holding his hands and sounding and looking so damn SINCERE while Stiles was still crying and speaking in metaphors and talking around things. He could handle snark and lies. He’d handled snark and lies through most of his life. He didn’t know what the lie was in Peter’s speech, though. He didn’t know how much of it was true. He didn’t know how much of it he wanted to be true. 

He’d just spoken so _plainly_. It was all like, “here’s my words, here’s my truth, do with it what you will.” People didn’t do that to him. Well, people didn’t do that to him about nice things. But Peter had always been there. Even when he hadn’t wanted the bastard around, Peter had always been there. Even when this damn wolf was a complete and total headcase, Peter had always been there. He’d solved problems and did research and showed that he could take care of himself, and Peter had always been there. He’d never, NEVER thought of Peter as a shiny he’d picked up and carried with him, and Peter claims to have fallen in love with him anyway. Did he love Peter?

He’d fallen in love with a series of letters, with being cared for. He’d fallen in love with debates on books and movies and stimulating intellectual conversation. He’d fallen in love with a person who had figured out what interested him and then made it so he could further those interests. He’d fallen in love a person who cared about HIM, not his research abilities or his blood or his ability to think quickly on his feet. That person was right there in front of him. He’d toyed with the idea of being in love with Peter Hale for the past twenty-four hours, with reconciling the two people he knew this man as. Now Peter had just told him that he’d loved him, no room for interpretation or debate in the words he’d used. He’d known going into this conversation that Peter was someone he wanted to explore more, someone he wanted to have a relationship with. Was it actual, honest-to-god love already? Did he even know what honest-to-god love was? 

He cleared his throat, just in case the tears had any intention of messing with his vocal cords, and looked into Peter’s eyes. “I want more, Pete. I don’t know how this is going to play out. I’m still trying to reconcile the you from high school with the you I’ve had this school year, but I think I fell in love with the you I’ve had this school year. Maybe.” He closed his eyes. “I don’t know. I’m not even sure what love actually looks like, if I’m being honest. I just know that I want to try this with you. I want more snark about movies and arguments about prevalent themes in young adult dystopian novels. I want to sass you about abstract art and take you to the best diner in DC and make you share my curly fries. I think I—I think I want to let you take care of me.”

Arms circled around his shoulders and rested under his knees, and then he was being picked up and carried again.

“Then that’s what we are, baby. It really is that simple.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! An entire chapter with NO SEX! Sure, it's a shorter chapter, but hey, I still managed to accomplish it. Leave it to Stiles to drop without actually getting to enjoy the bliss of subspace in the first place. Also, leave it to Peter to not give up when normal aftercare doesn't manage to completely rectify the situation, and I am very proud of both these boys for actually using their words.


End file.
